Right outside of the Building Museum in DC, after Senator Clinton's farewell speech, my spouse began conversations with her friends about how to support Senator Obama. It's taken me longer. Since then, I've ranted to my friends and posted on a couple of issues that irritated me about the Obama campaign - and I've read your comments. Of course, it's conceited to think that my decision matters to anyone, but having made one's doubts public, reconciling them should be public too.

My spouse just left the house to attend her first local Obama campaign gathering, at which she will speak. For someone who has faced down the right wing in the past, she's unusually nervous about how her remarks will go down with this new group of friends. For me, it's time to follow my spouse's lead. Yes, I have issues with some of Obama's positions, but time is passing and McCain is a bloody nightmare.

At Clinton's farewell speech, I talked for a while with Heidi Li Feldman, who now leads the Denver group, pressing for Clinton's name to be placed into nomination. As we waited for the speech, Heidi told us that Clinton could be an enormously influential political force in the coming decade. But even if you believe that to be a good thing, I think that it can only be achieved if the Democrats win the White House. That will require discipline and unity, not a contested convention.

So it's time to plant those yard signs and start attending fundraisers again.  Our daughter is a big Clinton fan as well and she really wanted a girl president. It'll probably take her a little longer still to come around, but there again, she has the luxury of not voting yet.

This may be overkill, but some folks may have overlooked the historical and legal framework that makes even Senator Obama's latest position worrisome to the pro-choice community and to those, like me, who believe that a woman's health is a matter only for her and her physician.
So here's a final attempt to get the point over by pointing folks to a nice recent post by Frank James at The Swamp. The senator may still have some clarification to do to get everyone on the same page.

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/pol itics/blog/2008/07/obamas_lateterm_abort ion_probl.html

Quoting from a colleague with a legal background, James writes:

<>Subsequent cases in the Supreme Court and lower courts have said states cannot ban abortions where the doctor deems them necessary to protect a woman's physical and mental health. Lower courts have taken that to mean a state cannot prohibit an abortion--even one post-viability--if the woman would suffer severe emotional harm without it. Nowhere do those cases impose criteria of "serious clinical mental health diseases."
That's not what the law is today. The Court has said the Constitution prohibits states from banning post-viability abortions unless those laws contain a broad mental health exception---one that includes mental distress and severe emotional harm. Abortion rights groups have fought for decades to preserve these exceptions, and I'm awfully curious what they will think about limiting them to women with mental disease or mental illness./

There's been handwringing about Senator Obama's opposition to the recent Supreme Court decision denying the death penalty for child rapists. The senator's opinion on this ruling is entirely consistent with his previous statements. Here's one documented by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life:

http://pewforum.org/religion08/compare.p hp?Issue=Death_Penalty

Obama says the death penalty "does little to deter crime" but he supports it for cases in which "the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage."

So, since child rape (as opposed to the rape of grown women or men) is so reviled by the community, the death penalty is to be imposed...even though it doesn't work.

Am I missing something here?

I'm a transfer from Kos, where, ignorant of the strike, I put up my first diary as a Clinton supporter. I described how I simply could not comprehend Senator Obama's membership of a Church whose leader preached the view that U.S Government scientists created the AIDS virus to commit genocide against African Americans. Here is the diary for those who can stomach going over to Kos.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/3 /15/84638/8661

My wife has a cousin who went in for brain surgery just before an election. She voted absentee because she was afraid that after the surgery she would wake up a Republican. I seemed to have got to the same point without surgery, having this morning opened my copy of the WaPost and agreed with much of a column by Michael Gerson on Obama's speech.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con tent/article/2008/03/18/AR2008031802594. html?hpid=opinionsbox1

So I'm appealing for a lifeline. Given my very personal opposition over the past few years to the influence of religion on public health policy, how can I possibly vote in the Fall for a man who tolerated and financially supported a pastor who spread such dangerous rumors about the origins of AIDS? I've already rejected the excuse offered by the legacy of the Tuskegee experiments. Nursing mistrust is a terrible substitute for rational public health policy.