My vote.

So, I've decided who I will vote for in my first american election. For a start I want to give my appreciation for my father who has clearly explained the value of my vote. This being statistically almost zero other than how it makes me feel about myself. In a first past the post system the only time when it makes a difference whether you voted or not, or how you voted, is when the election is seperated by a single vote, which is almost never. So, I'm going to cast my vote based on how it will make me feel.
To start with I want to express how relieved I am by the three candidates we have left. All three seem sane, actually connected to reality, unlike the present siuation. With Huckerbee and Nader out it means that the wacky people are out, both of them meant well, but the USA wants nothing to do with either of their positions, theocracy and socialism respectively. Mitt Romney struck me as someone who had the old belief that what is good for GM (big american business) is good for America and would therefore have done whatever necessary to enrich those companies no matter the expense to the US citizen. But the three left all seem to grasp the concept that others have different opinions, and working with others gets things done while disagreeing with them gets nothing done. So, at worst, things will get better.
So, I'm going to characterize the three candidates left in how they make me feel, rather than the substantive policy positions. Not only am I doing this because that's the biggest effect of my vote in real terms, but also because it doesn't matter what politicians say they are going to do, they often don't, they often can't, and ofen it's a good idea to change your mind when you've gone and bolloxed the whole thing up in the first place.
Hillary Clinton makes me think of a safe, conservative investment. Like a savings account. I believe her to be a highly competent politician and bureaucrat. America under Hillary will be sensibly but unspectacularly run. She will use the model of the USA over the past fifty years which will be safe and steady and at the end of it she will be voted out of office because of the problems she will have inherited. A recession, war, debt and declining services will mean that the USA will be steadied, but not return to vibrancy.
I think John McCain is a decent person with a basic level of understanding of the world. I think he would start off as a somewhat lame-duck president, halted from achieving anything significant by a democratic congress (gridlock is actually among my favorite positions in USA politics, the USA often does best when the government does nothing). But John McCain seems to me too afraid. He wants to preserve and limit threats rather than nurture and create good things. He seems to me a person hanging on to the past, someone who believes that the USA is #1 while the rest of the world gently passes it by. John McCain seems to me like one of the last captains of the British Raj, hanging on in a charming, crumbling colonial manse writing detective stories based in a world that nearly existed but twenty years ago. That is my favorite aesthetic, but a poor way to run the world.
Barak Obama gives me the chance to hope. I don't believe him to be more competent than the other two, I think his chances of being a good president to be no better than the other two. He may well be a con man, saying the right things in a charming and intelligent way but really without much ability to get things done. Jimmy Carter is a deeply good man, full of the right principles and a belief that good things can be done. but that doesn't do you a lot of good when faced with the american people. But there's a chance, just a chance, that Barak Obama will do the things he talks about. He might actually have an Apollo Program for alternative energy. He might actually engage the rest of the world from a position f respect. he might actually invest in education and health care. He might do these things, and I want to have voted based on hope, rather than based on fear of incompetence.