Mr. Toad's Wild Ride!

Man, this election is off the chain! We've got Kerry's cold-blooded endorsement of Obama (take that Edwards) after Clinton's "where did that come from" win in New Hampshire by what before Iowa would have been a disappointing two percentage points but after Iowa seemed like a landslide. We've got a Republican roller coaster ride going on the other side of the park and the voters are lining up at the polls like we haven't see since Memorial Day at Six Flags. Hang on to your seats! My vote might even mean something here in Texas on March 4th if Super Tuesday splits. Wow! I guess Democracy is alive and well. Cool. Maybe the only thing we can thank Bush for is for shaking the electorate awake.

As a Democrat, I am especially pleased, because despite Biden's withdraw from the contest, I still have confidence in the rest of the field. Whoever the nominee is in the end, I will go into the voting booth and place my vote with confidence, pride and optimism. No holding my nose this time around. And I have a little more faith in the Republicans now, too. McCain is doing well and Romney has been disappointed in several contests. Huckabee took Iowa and is alive in South Carolina. They are not goose-stepping their way to the convention for a change. Could it be? Are they actually thinking?!

The whole voting public is along for Mr. Toad's Wild Ride! And it is exhilarating, because people are talking politics again and people are awake.

I met an interesting young man from my alumna mater, Georgetown University, last week. His name is Luke Lagera and he is working under the university's current president on a committee to connect with alumni and see how are college experience affected us and what we'd like to know about our school and so on. We handled the college business in about ten minutes. We spent the next hour talking politics. He's an undergrad. I graduated in '94. He's a Republican. I'm a Democrat. He likes Romney. I called Romney a snake oil salesman. I love Biden. He thinks Biden's Iraq plan is recipe for disaster. He believes in Reagan-nomics. I think the capital gains tax is too low. But we laughed together. We listened to each other--and we actually heard each other. Now we're friends on Facebook. It's a brave new World.

Maybe this election is the start of a new and more positive era. Maybe people are finally getting tired of being afraid of each other and will start to crawl back out of those bunkers it seems we've been hunkered down in for so long. Let's ride this thing together! YeeHa!