I got a call this afternoon from a friendly Obama volunteer back in Ohio (I spent a couple damp, drizzly hours leafletting for Barack during the Democratic primary there.) Wanted to know if I was up for doing a little more groundwork in the upcoming weeks. And I am. I've been meaning to make that call. But then, there are a lot of things I mean to do and never get around to doing, only to kick myself over the next year. Or eight.

I'm not a terribly political person, I used to think. Not the sort to volunteer, to to put the bumper stickers and lawn signs out, to buttonhole people or lean on them to vote this way or that, to proselytize in any way. It's just not me, being my parents' kid.

My parents, after all, are pretty solid middle-of-the-road suburban folks, without too many political pretensions. No more news junkies or ideological activists than they are ignorant dupes, they follow the news a bit, and turn up at the local middle school on Nov. 5 to pull their levers, and that's about it. It's them I think of when I imagine the center in this country, not this moronic Joe Sixpack caricature.

Yet I can't tell you much about who they've voted for in my lifetime. Here and there, I've heard a little bit about those they can't or couldn't stand, for god knows what reason; like Hillary (Mom), Nixon (Dad.) For them, for my father especially, much politics seem to be about antipathy as advocacy, as much about the gut feeling you get from a candidate as what they say or do. After all, Dad is not a wonk. He is a white, northeastern Catholic centrist, of a generation that preceded the baby boom by a couple years and shares so little with it, culturally. A veteran, who served abroad in the early 60s - he'd have been among the first vaporized if the Russians shot their load and roared through the Fulda Gap - who found a good, comfortable middle-class life, along with so many others like him, in the latter half of 20th century America. Now he's a small businessman whose main concern is trying to keep things going for him and his. I can't vouch for him caring much about Bush II, but I know that Kerry, like Gore before him, turned him off.

I don't get home to see them much anymore, so we tend to make a vacation of it when I do. These trips involve driving. Driving involves talking, and this involves trouble. Because I am now a political person, and it has been a long time since we've talked politics - my father and I, especially - without it ending uneasily, or flat-out badly. So we try to avoid the subject.

We speak different languages. We see different things. In that sense we come from very different places. I know exactly when whatever latent political interest I had was activated, along with much of this generation - in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. It was incomprehensible to him that I would go protest in Manhattan. Not incomprehensible that the war might be wrong, or that we might be lied to. But that I would go. "My country, right or wrong" and all that, as a conditioned response.

I talked to my father just before Thursday evening's spectacular, and I was amazed. Amazed because he was openly, vocally repelled by the underqualified, overweening Sarah Palin. Moreover, he put that directly on John McCain and his judgment. He offered how he once liked McCain, but that's all gone now. He concurred with my feeling that Palin represents the worst mix of unlikeability, smugness and lack of fitness for the job. Of course, the folksy bullshit, the "back in Alaska"/"out there on the elite East Coast" false-dichotomizing and that grating accent cut no ice at all with either one of them. East coast elites that they are.

More to point of the issues, my mother, a human resources pro, is absolutely appalled - both personally and professionally - at the proposed McCain health care package, which she naturally understands much better than I do. A $5000 tax credit for families? she asks, as if they're really serious about that. She knows that won't cover six months worth of coverage for her and my father. And they are healthy! She imagines that those who are healthy enough to do so might just pocket the five grand, bringing on an eventual systemic collapse. It won't just not work, it'll be a raging disaster.

It's a strange time, when my parents are bending my ear about politics, and it ends with a happy, almost giddy accord between all of us. How we see only one way out of this now. It's not like their turning dark blue will make much difference - not in Connecticut. But I'd like to think, and I do think, that this conversation (and conversion) is going on throughout the country lately.

Labels: family, obama, politics