The Birth of Political Thinking

I'm driving the HB to school and I ask him if he wants to go with me to vote (today's Super Tuesday in CA, in case you haven't noticed all of the screaming). After I promise that I'll let him mark the ballot (if the polls workers will let me bring him in the booth with me) he says yes. This is one of those things where I tell myself if he sees me and/or my wife voting it will make it more likely he'll vote. That can have unintended consequences, but I'm willing to deal with that.

This conversation leads to a discussion about the candidates. I'm one of those parents who doesn't mind teachers talking about these things. It encourages political curiosities and I have confidence in the school's teachers not to overly preach. You can tell that some political messages get through to kids because the HB says that he would vote for Obama because he represents change (I think that sound I heard was Lola's head hitting the ground). So, I ran through the other candidates to see what, if anything, he thought of them. At some point he said something to the effect, "Well, they couldn't be much worse than Bush." Atta boy!

Then I talked to him that my political party, Libertarians, is neither the democrats or the republicans. He said that they hadn't talked about other parties at school. Going back to the change theme, I asked him, "HB, if the democrats and republicans have been the ones in power for all of these years, how do you expect any of them to really change things?" The silence of 8 year old contemplation filled the car. He then said, "Y'know, I'm gonna ask my teacher about the Libertarian and other party candidates today." That's my boy.