Ignoring the primaries and starting with the actual Presidential race between Obama and McCain, there were a lot of things I learned. Why does someone lean right or left? Does anyone pay attention to the candidate or just the loyalty they have with a party regardless of who is representing it? How strong and hard are the feeling for and against a particular party? It was amazing to see, on certain occassions, how personal things got and to what extent people went to defend their choice.

To begin with, I do not support either party blindly and I'm not against any one candidate just for the heck of it. Initially, I was looking at both Obama and McCain. Why should anyone trust Obama when his very short political career reflects very little of what he accomplished? Just 'coz he is an eloquent speaker does not mean one should fall for it. On the other hand, McCain belongs to a party that did more harm than good to this country and the world in the last eight years than anyone else did in the past. How much ever of a "maverick" the old man is, one does not expect his fundamentals to be much different than the Republican party. If at all he were so different, he wouldn't belong to that party in the first place. He would have been with the Democrats or ended up an Independent. So the bottom line is both of them had their pros and cons. So why did I eventually end up leaning Obama? It's 'coz of Mrs. Palin, the VP candidate (not Vice Presidential but Viciously Painful). Also, because of Mr. McCant's performance in the debates.

I always felt all of NY ("all" being the key word) is strongly Democratic and hence a "blue state". I was surprised to realize that I was surrounded by so many Republican supporters around me at work. Primarily I could see three reasons why anyone supported the Republican party. 

 - Anyone who is against the "spread the wealth" ideology

 - For national security reasons (I'm still not sure what exactly this means)

 - Religious conservatives

The first one is pretty straightforward and when asked what they meant by that, the unanimous answer was "I worked hard to get to where I'm right now and why should the Government tax me more 'coz I'm more successful and give it to someone who does not want to work?" I really did not have answer for this. This is not a communist country. It is capitalism and everybody earns their own bread. But then, someone else raised an interesting point. What makes you think everyone on welfare is being a grabass and that most of them are actually not fortunate to get a job anywhere? Now - how do we define "unfortunate" here? Boy... you see I'm having so much trouble defining certain terms in this context. In any case, do I really want to believe that 'fortune' plays a role in the land of opportunities? I think this Q&A session can go on forever.

National Security: Very sensitive issue and it is highly personal. So unfortunately I could not get much of logical explanation for this kind of support. One resounding phrase was "country before anything else". Of course, that is the most important thing but does that mean the Democrats don't put their country before anything else? I would guess the liberals are, every inch, as patriotic as any conservative.

Coming to religious conservatives, this is again something to do with "belief" and hence no room for logical argument. But I definitely have something to say here. I, personally, don't see any room for religion in politics in a secular country.

The Palin Affect: Quite a few of my Republican supporter buddies had issues with the media screwing Palin left and right. I know what they mean but if you look at it, why will the media "unfairly" target only one candidate and not the other as long as they prove to be entertaining enough? If you are talking about Fox or MSNBC, I can see why but with CBS, I doubt it. She proved herself to be ignorant. I was even asked why Obama isn't put in that position. Give me a break, he had three debates with McCain and he definitely proved he "knows" what he is talking about and what is needed. Another question was "why is everyone stressing so much on Palin when she is simply a VP candidate?" Absolutely! But one gotta keep in mind that she would have been a 72 year old president's one breath away of becoming the next commander in chief in case the Republican ticket won (I didn't come up with this statement. Copied it from some reporter). As a colleague of mine put it, looking carefully at both, the Democratic and Republican VP candidate would never had been more important ever before. While the analysts put one presidential candidate's probability of making it through his first term at not a very impressive number, the other might face threats from some radicals. Well... look at the skinheads who already tried. Then comes the negative campaigning. McCain was sensible enough not to encourage his supporters to say anything nonsense while Palin said "people may say this is negative campaigning but all they are saying is true". Funny - I guess "Obama is Muslim, he is an Arab" is all "true" according to Palin.

Bottom line - None of the parties / candidates is perfect for obvious reasons. But one gotta just pick the better of the two. Is Obama a good choice? We just have to wait and see!