A Tom Clancy Democrat

The Debates will decide my vote.

I decided about voting for Bush when in the 3rd debate in 2000, some nice woman with a couple of kids asked Al Gore how his tax cut plan could help her and he babbled on about 10 different hoops she'd have to jump through to get any lower taxes and you could see by the look on her face, she had no chance of doing any one of them. And he was acting dopey and we can't have a dopey president.

On the way to work I came up with a new term for a voter like me these days - they had the soccer mom, nascar dad, Reagan democrat and now security Mom.

I'm a Tom Clancy Democrat. This might become the next ubiquitous term for why democrats don't vote for Kerry.

When Sec. Rice said nobody had ever thought of people using commercial airplanes as weapons, I was incredulous. Don't these people read Tom Clancy?? What worried me was that his next novel was about terrorists getting a nuke and setting it off in the USA. What if the terrorists are running the Tom Clancy playbook?

I really don't like Bush on stem cell research, tax cuts (I think about half the population is single and doesn't have any kids, but do you ever hear anybody talk about us when they are handing out tax cuts? It's always child tax credits, marriage penalty, etc.), not vetoing the farm bill which was way out of whack, his evangelistic tendencies and lots of other things...

But getting the terrorists before they get us tips the balance to me at the moment. I'm hoping, I guess, that Kerry will show something in the debate that will convince me that he will do a good job. Realistically, it doesn't matter who I vote for because Kerry will most certainly win California, so I just vote my conscious. I knew after Kerry had won the primaries that I wouldn't be able to decide until I saw them side by side in the debates.

I think the ideal outcome is Bush wins, but the democrats take at least the Senate, so there is some check and balance again. The best years were when it was Clinton vs. the republicans - lots of jobs, balanced budget, etc. having either party completely in charge is bad mojo.