In the end, it came down to Iraq, and I decided to support the high-profile presidential candidate who did not vote for it.
But there's one last thing that really worries me about Barack Obama.
Life has not given him a good adult smack upside the head yet. In political years, he's young, but his life and career have taken off. He's redeemed the suffering and instability of his youth with a trajectory that has overall gone nowhere but up--and fast. Both professionally and, with his stable family life, personally.
This is the trap the universe sets for the people it particularly hates.
The ancient Greeks believed that you could have too much luck. There's a legend about Philip of Macedon which says that, one day, the king was resting from the hunt with his friends by a river. A rider came with news for him: "Your general Parmenion has won a great battle against the Illyrians, your horse has won a race in the Olympic Games, and your wife has had a son [none other than Alexander the Great]."
Philip, appalled, prayed on the spot for some bad luck to offset this dangerous amount of good fortune. He supposedly threw his hat in the river to help things along.
Barack Obama has had the kind of luck that would make Philip of Macedon throw away more than just his hat. Young, charismatic, brilliant, and rewarded for it, he rocketed to stardom after his awe-inspiring speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, rose to the Senate (after his strongest opponents were undone by personal scandals) in a historically large victory, is crushing everything in his wake in his current Presidential campaign, he's solid in his personal life--he hasn't even had a major screwup, like when Bill Clinton lost his reelection campaign as governor of Arkansas in 1980.
This, for god's sake, is even more dangerous than the life trajectory George W. Bush.
George W. Bush has had no luck at all, and I mean that in the technical sense; if you read about his early career, his connections and money loom large. As befits a conservative, he lives in a world where money and power talk. It's a predictable, logical world--provided, of course, you're not dumb enough to start a two-front land war in Asia. Ahem.
But Barack Obama is a child of destiny. And as the ancient Greeks knew, destiny is cruelest to the ones that seem most favored.
I hope, I hope, I hope--audaciously as the case may be--that I am wrong. Or at least that Miss Destiny waits until it no longer matters to anyone but her and her beloved.
