After graduating from college, my first full-time writing position was with a trade magazine on Capitol Hill. The man I worked for was a DEMOCRAT, and I use the capital letters to denote the importance he put on this fact. His wife in kind was a REPUBLICAN, and this difference, and the opportunity to disagree, debate and no doubt argue politics seemed to be one of the main things that not only kept them together, but made life worth getting up for every morning. I imagine so identifying with their party and their party's beliefs, like Jack Spratt and his wife, must have simplified an existence that we all know can get quite complicated.

Yet I have never fully embraced this two-party system And while I realize the commitment to a party affiliation must be something like a marriage, you compromise on some specifics for the benefit of the whole and I am still married, I still want to believe there's a better way to design our country's process. And this is one of the main reasons: what I find often impresses me the most about our party system is what often impresses me the most about religious affiliations — these alignments often invite ways to disagree more than ways to come together. Ideally, I'd like to believe that as our world gets smaller and smaller, we can figure out more ways to join over our commonalities than divide over our differences.

Though I prefer to vote for the individual regardless of party affiliation, I can't vote in any primary unless I am affiliated, so, since the majority of candidates I choose are Democrats, I am a registered Democrat. This primary, with two strong candidates, created an opportunity for me, and Democrats, to polarize within the party itself, or to find positive features to embrace about whichever candidate was not our first choice.

I am for Barack Obama. Yet I could find facets of Hillary Clinton to embrace.

Certainly millions of women in our country and around the world can respect and appreciate the barriers she broke down in her nearly-successful run for Democratic candidate for president of the United States. I number in the that group. And yet it's her particular method that has inspired me. A member of her team speaking on a news show after Obama clinched the party's nomination described Hillary as a person able to compartmentalize better than anyone she'd ever seen. Compartmentalizing wasn't a new idea to me, but seeing it clearly in action gave me a concrete model of success. When my mind starts once again to jump from one task to all the others ahead of me, I now think of Hillary and her single-mindedness in going after what she wanted. Somehow, that helps me focus my energy on the task at hand, instead of spreading it thin on all the things I haven't even gotten to yet. Hillary's associate also said Hillary never worried about "what ifs." What if I spend all this time writing a novel, and no publisher wants it? That's a hefty enough "what if" right there.  But it's a total waste of time and energy if writing this novel is my goal, a nasty "what if" that can chip away insidiously at my resolve, my energy, and my confidence. Hillary has also become my lodestone for banishing any "what ifs" that creep into my thoughts.

Stay focused on your goal, and pursue it with confidence, that wisdom I can embrace about Hillary Clinton. And I embrace the opportunity to vote for Barack Obama for president of the United States in November. Would I have been so ready to discover positive commonalities if "my" candidate had not won the Democratic nomination?  That would have been the real test...