lives and writes

in Chester County

Last week I registered as a Democrat, no small step for a long-contented Chester County Republican. Weaned on William F. Buckley Jr., I was a teenage Barry Goldwater adherent in 1964. My first job was in the administration of New York City Republican Mayor John Lindsay, and my second was in the executive offices of New York Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

One does not lightly abandon such deep political roots.

In any other year, I give this primary season a pass and vote Republican in November.

This is not any other year, nor any other vote.

I became a Democrat to cast an April 22 Pennsylvania primary vote that I believe will be the most important of my lengthy political life.

I've witnessed key moments in 20th-century political history. In 1960, at a rally near my Bronx home, I heard a John F. Kennedy speech that started me toward a life of public service. Kennedy shared the platform with jowly New York politicians, and I was a curious 14-year-old in a crowd of adults. Kennedy spoke to my generation with themes that resonated then and now: He asked us to engage personally with the business of the country and seek more equitable outcomes for every American.

I was also tuned in for Ronald Reagan's 1964 "Time for Choosing" speech in support of Barry Goldwater's candidacy. Reagan grabbed listeners as powerfully as Kennedy had: by elevating our country's founding values to the center of his discourse, by enunciating principles as the foundation for coming to grips with vexing policy issues, and by telling Americans they had a "rendezvous with destiny." I remember thinking, "This is the person who ought to be running for president," which, by 1980, at another momentous point in U.S. political history, he was.

This country today is more in need of new energies and perspectives in the White House than in 1960 when John Kennedy electrified my generation, or in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan won resounding mandates to reverse long-entrenched policy approaches. Indeed, today we are at a critical public-policy juncture and at a generational crossroads at the very same time the legitimacy of our political processes hangs in the balance.

We are bleeding red in Iraq and in the federal budget. The economy is tanking, the dollar in free fall. Our debt to oil-producing nations and Asian economic powerhouses like China grows daily. Foreign entities hold our national mortgage note, and we may be depression-bound if they don't keep refinancing the loan. Bush alone did not get us to this point, though he did plenty. Bedazzlement with the global economy and blind faith in the market began with Reagan, but was alive and well in the Clinton administration.

Our politics are as much a mess as our economy. Since Pennsylvania's last presidential primary, governors of Connecticut, New York and New Jersey have resigned in disgrace. Pennsylvania's political rogues' gallery never wants for fresh faces. But the felonious faces simply distract us from the real bankruptcy in our political system. Policy gridlock grips our state houses and our national capital. Good ol' boy/girl networks work backroom legislative deals, shun reform-minded colleagues, and look on the gerrymander as high art.

Campaigns of ideas have been replaced by "gotcha" politics: endless loops of Obama in a turban, his pastor rousing Sunday congregants with wacky rhetoric, talk-radio-heads slowly enunciating Barack Hussein Obama, and Hillary Clinton's studied hesitancy on 60 Minutes about whether Obama is a Muslim. We have the "race card," "the indignation card," "the religious card," and the "gender card." Kennedy and Reagan must be rolling over in their graves - they thought enough about Americans to talk about ideas.

For decades, the politics of identity, indignation and inertia has substituted theatrics and machination for deliberation and decision, and the younger you are, the more you will be burdened with bills not paid and decisions deferred. Yet, no American under 50 has ever entered a presidential voting booth without a Bush or Clinton as a presidential or vice presidential choice. I shudder at the thought of extending that to 36 years.

Abraham Lincoln served two years in Congress more than a decade before his inauguration. Most of his political career was as an Illinois legislator. In two tries for the Senate, he withdrew once, lost the second time. Yet he became our greatest president by rallying the country around foundation principles while deftly managing fractious politics.

I am registering Democratic to cast my vote for another ex-Illinois legislator with a relatively short time in Washington who offers a unifying vision, cross-generational appeal, a proven deft touch, and an ability to lead this country through tough times to the better place it needs to be.

Barack Obama.