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I cast my first presidential vote for Al Gore in 2000, and I did so with pride–with just as much, and I will confess perhaps more, than when I voted for Obama yesterday, and more than I would have had voting for Clinton if I’d had the opportunity. Gore was a perfect candidate for me, an earnest, laconic southern Democrat with a passion for the future of media, technology, and the environment, a student of media theory who would later make a popular, Oscar-winning documentary from a slideshow about environmental science. I don’t mean to argue that Gore was a better candidate or politician than either, or that he would have made a better president, just that I was young, and cast an aspirational vote for a man I admired.
Today, our president-elect is a young, brilliant technocrat with little experience and lots of promise, the leader of his party for the first time in his political career, a self-made man from nowhere and everywhere, Hawaii, Indonesia, New York, and Chicago, the biracial child of a single parent household with an African name given to him by his Muslim-turned-atheist absentee father, Barack Hussein Obama II, the 44th president of the United States.
