2. On being Black: If Obama wins, it will not be a simple victory for America in its race problem. His election will occur, I think, not because of his race, but despite it. I note that many of my fellow PT bloggers seem a bit self-satisfied: Obama becomes a symbol of how America has progressed beyond racism. This smugness may fly in Boston and New York, but it does not reflect the realities of Georgia and Colorado. A white rural Obama canvasser in Indiana recently made the point which Hillary Clinton could never make without being accused of racism: Obama would be even more ahead in Indiana if he was white. His ability to get white votes as he does is partially the result of avoiding race as much as possible. He did not even feel comfortable using Martin Luther King's name in his convention speech, and he has pushed civil rights leaders to the sidelines.  Some hail this "generational change;" I smell denial.

3. On being middle-named Hussein: I have to make a confession. I voted for Obama in the Georgia primary last February (before I moved back to Massachusetts) because of identity politics primarily for one reason: He reminds me of me. We both have foreign funny names, Muslim in fact; we both come from exotic backgrounds; and in the usual course of American public life, those two facts alone would have excluded us from the circle of power. I am very proud that Obama is breaking this ceiling, and it gives me hope for myself and my children. But I also know that many white Americans, with WASP names, and vanilla backgrounds, will, on similar grounds, vote for John McCain. I cannot criticize them for their identity politics, while justifying my own. Obama says that people should not vote for or against him based on his race. But this is a chimera. It will happen, and it is not entirely unreasonable. I do not feel, for instance, defensive about voting for him because I identify with him. Of course I also agree with almost all his policies; if he were a conservative republican, I would not vote for him. But I did vote for him over Hillary Clinton primarily based on identification: that is a factor in politics, and for some who waver in the middle, between Obama and McCain, it will lean them one way or the other.  The Palin quest for "real" Americans and "pro-America" Americans is, in my view, code for such nativist identity politics.

4. The Palin factor and men: The physician-writer Lewis Thomas once proposed that the world would be better off if we could state, by fiat, that for the next 100 years only women should be allowed to vote. Men would take a well-deserved rest from millennia of ruling the world. If we arranged a Thomas plebisicite, the Obama lead would be a landslide. Which brings us to the interesting question of Sarah Palin: Is she bringing in the female vote for McCain? The conventional wisdom is that she has strengthened him in his conservative base and somewhat with women.  As a man, I do not rush to make this claim, which I expect will be viewed as politically incorrect, but I think that it is very likely that, besides the conservative core, she is attracting, literally, male voters (not females), enraptured more by her heels and her tight dresses than by her policies. When the RNC spends $150,000 on clothes and accessories, they are not targeting evangelicals. Maybe we would have been better off taking the Lewis Thomas approach.

(Like the question of race, it is difficult to raise this question, especially as a Middle Eastern male, without being accused of sexism.  So, to pre-empt such reaction, let me just state that Palin and all young women politicians face a similar problem: how to be allowed to be women, dressing as they like, and yet be taken seriously as a leader. I sympathize, as best I can as a male, with that problem.   The dilemma, as with race, is that we cannot wish realities of gender away.)

5. The Iran bugaboo: I don't know how many times I have heard Palin say the name "Ahmadinejad," I suppose to make herself seem versed in foreign policy. I keep wanting to lean into the TV and ask her the name of the prior president of Iran: that would be "Muhammad Khatami." In psychiatric examinations, we test short term memory by asking patients to recall the last three or four presidents; it is amazing how often cognitively intact Americans stumble, especially on Reagan (the word Bush makes things easy by providing two answers). My reaction to Palin is not just an exercise in mental status; I am bothered by the fact that most Americans do not realize that Iran had a very liberal and flexible president for 8 years, before Ahmadinejad, who reached out repeatedly to the US, only to be rebuffed. Iran now, like the Soviet Union in the past, is a convenient bugaboo, especially for the right wing; in fact, we get what we claim we don't want: Khatami lost power because Iranians concluded that the US was not ready to reconcile, so they elected a conservative hard-liner.  And now we complain that Iran's president is a conservative hard-liner.

6. The war on terror: Is it not odd that we have good relations with China - a country which has no freedom of speech and no elections - and poor relations with Iran - where a free press can write almost anything, including severe criticism of the government, and where some elections (which are better than none) occur? It is hard to accept George Bush's claim, oft repeated by McCain and Palin, that this foreign policy is based primarily on promoting democracy.

There's my list; I want to get it on the record before the election is over, since afterwards there should be plenty to say, depending on who gets elected, as to how these issues - race, gender, the Middle East - get played out.  In the post September 11 world, what happens will affect us all, personally, and so we all have a duty to discuss these problems with each other.

Now let's allow this system of democracy - the worst available, except for all the rest, as Churchill said - give us a new government.