If you vote, who will you vote for, and why?

I'm reading Herta Muller (The Appointment, a novel) in which this sentence appears:

     "There's always someone you can love, if you put your mind to it".

The writing's so good it's hard to stop reading. I haven't been as addicted to a writer as I'm currently addicted to Herta Muller since I became addicted to Samuel Beckett in the mid-1990's.

She's Romanian and came of age in Ceausecu's Romania, gaining enough of the special attention of Ceausecu's secret police that she emigrated to Berlin in the late 1980's. Every sentence she writes feels written by someone who is being looked at and listened to by something much larger than the self, something so large and grotesque and monstrous and nasty that it can't be seen. Muller not only understands the situation of the individual in a totalitarian state, she renders it as a living if invisible being. There's no writer other than Kafka to who she can be compared.

I told a woman at dinner last night that she should read Herta Muller. We were talking about the political atmosphere in the United States, and the upcoming Presidential election. I guess you could call us liberals, in that we both had high hopes for Obama and were both now disappointed. I said that Obama had committed the cardinal political sin of alienating his base; she said that he'd proven he wasn't a leader and had chosen his advisors poorly. This woman is an accomplished person--she'd made a career as the chief-of- staff of one of this state's most visible and powerful politician's. She said she was "scared of the alternative" and would vote for Obama, but without passion.

Walking home along Bush Street last night, I thought that from now until election day I'd tell people to read Herta Muller and then decide who they should vote for, Romney or Obama, whenever the subject came up.