I've Decided - Not Too Late I Hope!

After watching the debate in Austin, I have to say, since my candidate - John Edwards - was eliminated early on in the primaries, I have been struggling to decide between the "Black, silver-tongued devil" and the "Female wheeler-dealer" (I have to be honest here people). Since another Republican Administration is not an option, as a 52 year-old Black woman, I made my decision tonight. I may be a day late and a dollar short, but I have decided. I don't care what the media has to say at this point (listened to the Anderson Cooper after-party and it's the same old, same old - men behaving badly), I have finally figured all of this out. The reason Sen. Obama has been referred to as an "empty suit" is because he was. I compared my notes taken on prior debates to the one tonight where he kept reminding every one - "I have detailed plans." - and I finally got it! He's NOT HAD a detailed plan. All along, he's been ambiguous as he formulated his details. The reason they sound so much alike is that he's been listening, re-tooling and borrowing the messages of Edwards and Clinton all along! She has been consistent and bold on every issue (that may not have been a good idea because it put too much out there for him to clone and give to people as something new and substantive) and even though I've thought of her as a "wheeler- dealer," NO ONE can touch her on health care. I remember her first foray into the eel-tank of Washington politics as a First Lady with the cojones to have a thought and the audacity to try and make it work (I thought then, she should have been the president instead of Bill). I admired that about her, but I knew the machine would not allow it to come to fruition (again, men behaving badly). Health care is something this woman has been dogged about for a very long time and she can go toe-to-toe with the best (and worst) of them on the topic. Her grasp of the Washington that IS, makes her a much more viable candidate in my opinion. Yes, we all want "change," but she knows what it's going to take for that to happen. She's been in the thick of it - good and bad - as First Lady and a senator and she knows that just asking for change won't make it so. I think he does too, but he can't say that, given the platform upon which he's been running. Anybody listening to the whole debate should be able to see that they are, as Maya Angelou said, "more alike than they are different" on policy (with a few distinct exceptions). The last question of the debate was her finest, finest hour (if she'd answered anything BUT, I would have done some serious eye-rolling!). As a woman, who's been through her share of the fire and is willing to be honest about it, as a mother of a son who returned from a year in Iraq in one piece, as an aunt of a nephew now serving his THIRD tour there and as a Navy veteran myself, I connected with her tonight like I never thought I would. As a Florida voter, disenfranchised by the DNC and the local Democratic Party, I hope somebody can slap Howard Dean upside the head and let him know that you can't spit on us in the primary by not counting our votes for the nominee and not seating our delegates at the convention. If he wants a unified Democratic Party, he needs to know that we matter - or maybe someone else can head the DNC.