Goodbye, Mother Hillary. Hello, Tomorrow.

“I’m going to tell them I bought my outfit second-hand from Hillary in Chappaqua,” my mother jokes each year as we make our way to Yonkers, NY to spend Thanksgiving with my father’s (mostly conservative) family. I don’t know if it’s the pants suit or the hair, but for years now my mother and Hillary Clinton have reminded me of one another. Smart and engaging and almost the same age, they even share an overbite. Clinton may appear cold to many, but, until she unleashed her husband as attack dog, she always exuded maternal warmth and the security of family for me. And so, it is with something akin to the angst of a child preparing to leave home that I plan to vote for Barack Obama.

The 1990s were the Clintons' decade - one that started with war and recession but ended in the longest peacetime expansion of the economy. The advent of email and the Internet was presided over by the luminaries from Arkansas. Bright and new, the Clintons were the first baby boomers to take over the national government. They were young, hopeful and said we were getting two for the price of one. They, like their theme song, beseeched the country to not stop thinking about tomorrow.

Today’s Clinton campaign takes a different approach. It talks more about yesterday than tomorrow. Clinton reminds us that in the 1990s there was peace and prosperity and that she was there. That's why she's tested. That's why she's ready. It took one Clinton to clean up after the last Bush, she often says, it's going to take another to clean up after this one.

Before rushing to agree with her, it is important to examine those years carefully. I was eleven when the nineties began and twenty-one when they were over. I grew up with the Clintons in that time. And just as I went through the inevitable loss of innocence that accompanies those years, so did the country.

The nineties were a decade-long political soap opera, replete with lies, sex and melodrama. They introduced the term triangulation into the national vocabulary - a deft policy of stealing ideas from political opponents and then playing the extremes of the opposition party against those of the one in power, as the executive appears to rise above the fray. In government, the supremacy of polling outstripped the importance of moral leadership. The administration decried vast right wing conspiracies – real or imagined - and inspired the worst tendencies in the Republican Party, who not only impeached the president and shut down the federal government, but also gained control of Congress, the presidency and a majority of the country's governorships by the time the Clintons took leave of the White House.

As bad as things are now, is this what we want to go back to?

Enter Barack Obama.

With political skills and smarts that match both Clintons, he has important qualities they lack – namely moral leadership, vision and an ability to unite diverse groups. As Clinton was casting her vote for the Iraq war, a poor decision that many of her former supporters – myself included – find hard to fathom she believed in, Obama was taking a public stance against it. Read from today’s vantage point, his speech opposing the war is prescient in its foresight of the imbroglio the government was about to enmesh the country and troops in. More impressively, the speech was given while Obama was planning to run for US Senate and the war was a popular idea with the public. This ability to speak honestly, even when it’s not politically advantageous, was further on display when Obama outlined his environmental positions to, of all people, the automobile industry. Obama’s message has been consistent and inspiring, resonating beyond the confines of the party faithful, to reach independents and Republicans. It is his ability to bridge these political divides – to remind us that we are not just a collection of red and blue states, but the United States – that provides a fresh alternative to both the Clinton and Bush eras.

Finally, when Obama lays out his vision for America, he does so in the most American of ways – by looking to tomorrow, not yesterday. The Clintons say that this is a dangerous roll of the dice, but I see it as something else, something akin to the children of this nation choosing to leave their homes to step boldly into the future. By 2009, the White House will have been inhabited by the Bushes and Clintons for twenty straight years. Enough’s enough.

So, sorry, Mom. This time, I’m voting for tomorrow.