http://www.timesofisrael.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-loving-obama-and-worry-about-the-bomb/How I learned to stop loving Obama and worry about the bomb
The Times of Israel’s military correspondent takes stock, six years after writing a heartfelt letter in support of the presidential candidacy of a young senator from Illinois
By Mitch Ginsburg April 9, 2015, 2:10 pm
Sometime in the fall of 2008 I sat down at my desk and banged out an impassioned letter to my sister. She was on the fence, I knew, about the young senator from Illinois who was running for president. There was some talk in the family that perhaps, on at least one occasion, during the Bush years, she had voted Republican.
We chalked it up to her decision, made as a college freshman, to marry a skilled and caring med student, who hailed from Michigan and loved cars. He drove a Chevy, Grand Am — candy red, I think — and called the city of his birth Dee-troit.
Sure, we realized, he was a terrific father and a stand-up guy all around, but he distrusted all things organic — he was in the habit of scrubbing my sister’s farmers’ market apples with hot water and soap — and he wore jeans while skiing. He loved mayonnaise and iceberg lettuce, had a soft spot for ATVs and leaf-blowers.
In short, we didn’t ask who he voted for — there was some hope that he might be a Libertarian — but, in the fall of 2008, the facts seemed quite clear: He was going with John McCain and Sarah Palin. My sister, I feared, might follow suit.
And so I took to the computer. In an email entitled “Politics” — which I reread this week for the first time in the wake of the nuclear framework deal agreed upon in Lausanne, a deal that has left me with the clammy feeling of anticipated betrayal — I spoke about the horrors of the American prison system and the plague of racism that continue to rot America from the inside; I spoke about drugs and how only people of color are incarcerated for using and dealing them, while people like George W. Bush and every other person I knew in college was free to pull bong hits, take acid, and boil ‘shrooms to his or her heart’s content. I think I spoke about African-American role models and education and gay rights. I even told her to read Frederick Douglass.
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