A Very Short Note About the Election

Down-ticket.

To be honest, Texas can seem a long way from the this election sometimes. Yes, people are working very hard here, on both sides, and there are yard signs all over the place - but there's very little intensity. Nobody has any doubt that McCain will win the state - there's more chance that Obama will win Arizona. Having said that, Houston is a lot less Republican than much of Texas and I haven't spoken to anyone about the election who hasn't said they are voting, or have voted, for Obama.

'Real' America.

I'm not button-holing people either. 

The lady in front of me in the supermarket queue was very forthcoming. She had just seen 'W', she told me and had been disgusted. Not that she liked Bush himself, but the film had depicted the President on the toilet and that was unacceptable - it demeaned the office of the presidency.

Right, I thought, like he hadn't done that all by himself.

She hadn't finished though - she was going to vote for Obama. She was a Democrat. But she had voted Republican when she lived in New York, of course - things were different up there. And wasn't all this just lovely for the blacks? (The black woman working the checkout didn't twitch - just waited implacably for her customer to shut up talking to me and pay for her shopping already.)

'Of course,' the old lady continued, 'it would have been much worse if Obama had picked Lieberman as his VP, because he is a Jew.'

I might have raised an eyebrow at this point because she hurtled on to explain herself slightly. 'I'm Jewish,' she said, hand on heart. 'But if he had picked a Jew, something would happen and they would blame us. Absolutely.'

There wasn't any ambiguity about the something to which she referred. The threat of assassination is a foul undercurrent of this campaign, but it is there. CNN cut to live coverage of an Obama rally the other night and I became acutely and uncomfortably aware that this was an open-air venue. In a land that is so politically divided, where there are so many excuses for someone to mistrust or feel threatened by a fellow American, there must be someone, hundreds of people perhaps, who are scared enough of this good man to try and kill him. Let's face it, it's happened before when change threatened America. It is sinking in now that these fears will not go away once he is elected.

However, this election is about Hope and not Fear. Everyone should read this story from Hartford, Connecticut and, for extra credit, the letter in question.

And yes, the man has staff. What's your point?