From TalkLeft.com - "Here's Why I Support Her"

I read the folowing post by hitchhiker in TalkLeft.com today, and asked her permission to post it here. She kindly agreed. Here is her post:

Here Is Why I Support Her:

Because in 2001, about 10 weeks after W was inaugurated, my husband broke his neck. His injury changed our lives, of course, in 10 thousand ways. We had the good luck to be insured, but I have bad news for those of you who think that even good insurance will protect you from this kind of catastrophe. The out of pocket costs in the first year alone were up in the $80,000 range.

Fast forward a few years . . . Christopher Reeve's death created a hole where there had been an advocate. A few people from an online community got together to hold a rally in the upper senate park. Hillary--not running for anything, not looking for anything--showed up. She showed up again the following year, and the year after that, offering her support to a bunch of gimps in wheelchairs and their loved ones.

She talked with us. No press could be bothered with a pitiful little rally like ours; very few politicians had time for us, even though travel for quadriplegics is at best complicated and at worst dangerous. Hillary Cllinton earned my everlasting respect for caring enough to look people in chairs in the face and tell them she would fight for them.

If she stays in the Senate, I have no doubt whatsoever that she'll continue to do just that. It's been a couple of months now since I could stand to visit websites that used to be like home to me. I think the left blogosphere has poisoned itself, and that's been painful to witness when so much was possible.

And she added a follow-up in her response to my request:

One of the people at the spring 2004 rally --a staunch Bush-supporter and devoted evangelical whom I often argue with online-- told me that he noticed she made it a point to go up and shake the hand of every person in a chair.
He had to admit that he saw nothing phony or cold or ambitious or whatever the hell they keep saying about her. She was simply trying to give people the message that not everybody in Washington was indifferent, and that if funding research was possible, she would do it.

This administration has cost my family. I have spent the last 7 years working and waiting for someone better . . . it's not about "drama", as somebody said upthread. Drama is when you don't have any genuine problems so you invent some to make yourself feel important. I will of course vote for Barack Obama, because the alternative is just unthinkable...

Thank you, Hitchhiker!