I’m a Clinton girl. We share an alma mater and a pragmatic sense of politics. She’s  impressed me the few times I’ve met her, and I have friends who have worked directly for her and for her campaign who say good things.

Also, as a woman and a feminist, I think it’s important to have a woman in the White House, and I can’t imagine who the next possible woman could be. I don’t think a woman’s politcs are different from a man’s politics, but I think that having women in leadership positions encourages social change. All things being equal - and they are - I’d rather have a woman in the White House than a man who has virtually equal poltical views.

So yeah, for those reasons and others, I’m planning on voting for Clinton in New York’s primary.

And yet.

The gay conservative writer Andrew Sullivan makes a compelling - and interesting - argument for Obama in December’s The Atlantic.

He says that Obama is the one candidate who can end the culture wars. Sullivan writes:

“To be black and white, to have belonged to a nonreligious home and a Christian church, to have attended a majority-Muslim school in Indonesia and a black church in urban Chicago, to be more than one thing and sometimes not fully anything - this is an increasingly common experience for Americans, including many racial minorities. Obama expresses such a conflicted but resilient identity before he even utters a word.”

And this complexity, with its internal tensions, contradictions, and moods, may increasingly be the main thing all Americans have in common.”

Sullivan paints a picture of Obama as crabby, as a doubter, as a man whose many contradictions keep him from jumping on anyone’s bandwagon. Obama, Sullivan says, should be the face of America, because Obama IS America -  a muddle of competing identities jostling against each other.

 Obama, Sullivan says, is the candidate who most expresses what America really is.

The article doesn’t make me undecided, exactly. But it gives me something new to weigh. For Americans, a woman in the White House would be a huge change. But the world won’t care - the world is accustomed to women in the highest office. What the world is NOT accustomed to is someone like Barrack Hussein Obama.

 As Sullivan says, if the dark-skinned, Muslim-schooled Obama became President:

If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

Obama, in Sullivan’s words, is a bridge between left and right, between blacks and whites, and between America and the world.