Below The Beltway

Apparently, it’s a real phenomenon:

GLEN ALLEN, Va. — Laura Barchi DeBusk threw on her boots and sunglasses as the school bus rounded the corner. Clutching her preschooler’s hand, she crossed the street along with half a dozen other stay-at-home moms. DeBusk and her neighbors — Republicans all — rarely discuss politics, but days before a primary election here she decided to send a little shock through her subdivision.

“You’ll be surprised to know I’m voting for Barack Obama,” DeBusk, 37, announced as the school bus pulled up.

“Really?” her friend Sherry Tierney, 36, said as their first-graders hopped off the bus. “Why?”

“I feel like we need to get out of the Bush black-and-white way of thinking,” DeBusk said. “I feel like McCain would also say, ‘It’s my way or the highway.’ . . . Obama’s message of inclusion and working together is what we need.”

“But he’s so young,” Tierney replied. “I like McCain.”

“He’s soooo old,” DeBusk fired back. “What will he be, 80, when he finishes his term?”

(…)

The Laura DeBusks of the country are just the kind of voters that Sen. Obama (D-Ill.) has courted — sick of what they’ve been offered, tired of where things are headed and willing to try something, anything, new. Exit polls from elections across the country last week showed that Obama won the majority of independent voters. DeBusk, like many voters, worries about Obama’s lack of experience, and she disagrees with him on a handful of issues, particularly his tax policies. But her desire for change is so great, she’s willing to take the chance.

“Even if he doesn’t do everything the way I’d like, I really feel like he can move us forward,” she said.

DeBusk was raised in a conservative military family where discipline, love of country and voting Republican were shared values. She respects McCain’s military service, but she’ll consider him only if Hillary Rodham Clinton is the Democratic nominee. She thinks Clinton is smart and capable but fears that Republicans so dislike the New York senator that the country will be polarized.

As I noted on Thursday, I’ve decided to vote for Obama in Tuesday’s primary as well. While my vision of him is far less pie-in-the-sky than DeBusk’s, I agree that America is in desperate need of a President who will move us beyond the partisan rancor that has characterized the last twenty years of American politics. Barack Obama seems to be that person and, even if I don’t vote for him in November, which I probably won’t, he’s the only one of the candidates still standing with a chance to win the White House who I could actually live with seeing on my television screen day in and day out for four years.