Voting for a local boy (in more ways than one)

A couple of weeks ago, Sarah and I cast our votes for POTUS (President of the United States) and for the office of senior senator from the state of Illinois. For the latter, I voted for the venerable Richard Durban, who holds the same seat as the late, great Paul Simon. (In case you’re wondering about the questions, the answers are yes, we can and do still vote from abroad, and no, we can’t do it over the Internet yet. We receive paper ballots in the mail and send them back the same way. Remember that our last home on American soil was Chicago, where one votes “early and often,” so that city is going to do all it can to get as many votes as it can.)

For the office of president, we voted for Mr. Durban’s esteemed colleague, the junior senator from Illinois, a man I had voted for once already (in that office), Mr. Barack Obama. Although I was an early supporter during the primaries of another Illinois native, Hillary Clinton (she grew up in Park Ridge, which is a Chicago suburb spitting distance from the ELCA), I am a card-carrying Democrat and will really vote for whomever the party puts up as its nominee (except for maybe someone like Sarah Palin).

Although I still carry some disappointment that this was supposed to be Hillary’s day (and, OK, Bill’s comeback), it still makes me proud that my senator is running for president. Not since Abraham Lincoln has Illinois sent someone to the White House, so this could be history in the making in that way as well. I’m not an Illinois/Chicago native, and even though I lived there for eight long years (and it’s where I started my career and met Sarah and got married), I still feel a bit strange calling it my home and saying I’m proud that “my” state’s leaders have taken to the national stage (I don’t feel totally at ease anymore saying I’m from Seattle either, but it’s a little easier to say my heart is on the East Coast, even though I lived there for really only four years during college.) Nevertheless, the fact that we can say we are from Chicago when asked where we’re from while living in Kenya has actually been very convenient. We happen to have chosen the country to live in a year ago where Obama’s father was from. So to say that Kenya has Obama fever is an understatement (last week the man who wrote the latest book that is critical of Obama was unceremoniously kicked out of the country just before he was to give a major press conference at a huge hotel downtown. No one here would deny that the reasons were political – because he was being critical of a native son of the country, where nobody believes he has a single flaw). During Obama’s rise earlier this year, I became grateful that I didn’t hail from a small town in a less popular state, like Topeka, Kansas, or Boise, Idaho, which anyone outside the country has never heard of. It has been very easy to say to Kenyans who ask where in the U.S. I am from that I am from Chicago. It doesn’t take long for the connection to be made and for them to reply with, “Isn’t that where Obama is from?” Last week while in a more remote corner of the country, I had a little fun with this and was telling people I met, “I come from Illinois, and my senator is a man by the name of Barack Obama. Have you heard of him? I already voted for him once as senator, and now I’ve voted to send him to the White House.”

Even though we’re voting for a native son, a hometown boy (even though I just said Chicago truly ain’t my hometown), and we know that Illinois, one of those major industrial and high-population states that is a must-win for any presidential candidate, will no doubt be a blue state, I wish our votes could have been cast in a state where they would have made more of a difference. Our votes for Obama might have tipped the scales in his favor in a battleground state like Virginia if we had voted there.

I’ve had several occasions in the last few years while living abroad to tell Americans back at home of the importance of the U.S.’s role in the world and of a solid American foreign policy and good relations with the rest of the world. In the five years we’ve lived abroad, we have gained a new perspective on our own country (especially from all my studies in my efforts to join the State Dept.), and, because of our line of work with desperately poor people in developing countries, we have seen how dependent many of these countries are on the U.S. in many ways, including economically in general and through foreign aid. This election, as has been said by the candidates themselves, is an opportunity to put the U.S. position with the world right again. Although the U.S. economy is the only thing on Americans’ minds right now, I want to remind all voting Americans that, in my opinion, foreign policy is an equally important issue and just as urgent. You can read one of my earlier posts about meeting some Somali refugees in an enormous camp in western Kenya. For that situation alone, the state of anarchy in Somalia, the world desperately needs a U.S. president who is willing to work with the U.N. and pressure it to resolve that conflict so these refugees can return to their own country.

But I’ll tell ya – and you’ve all probably heard this before – if all the other countries of the world could pick the U.S. president, they would probably elect Obama. And maybe they should be allowed to vote for our president or at least have some say. The U.S. president isn’t just the president of the U.S. – he is truly a world leader. And so I hope Americans can be mindful of this and not so narrowly focused on themselves and what their president will do for them.

So, in a few short weeks, I – along with all of Kenya here – will be watching the election with bated breath. I hope the man who also hails from some of my homes – Chicago and Kenya – wins!