SUPER TUESDAY: Split Personalities
There has been plenty of talk about families splitting their votes on Tuesday’s primary choices, but what about individuals doing the same with their own votes?
Meet Leslie Carroll. After walking out of her polling place on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Carroll explained how she dealt with her internal conflict.
“The way it works here is you have to choose six delegates, and I chose three who support Obama and three who support Clinton, plus an alternate who supports Obama,” said Carroll, 48, a novelist and New York City native.
“I had the hardest time of my life,” Carroll said. “It wasn’t until I was in the voting booth that I made up my mind. We have to have a Democrat and I voted for the person I thought could win in a general election.”
In the end, she decided that that person was Obama, and cast her personal vote — which has no bearing on the delegates — for him.
“I would love to vote for a woman,” she said, but explained that she was swayed in the opposite direction by Bill Clinton’s omnipresence in his wife’s campaign. “Their joint ruthlessness frightens me a bit,” she added.
Carroll’s husband, a career foreign service officer, voted for Clinton.
In the end, Carroll’s priority was not on electing a single candidate, but rather on helping the Democrats.
“You always ask yourself, ‘Is it good for the Jews?’” she said. “Well, it’s good for the Jews to have a Democrat in the White House!”
Carroll said she was not sure that Obama was a stronger candidate than Clinton on Israel, but she assumes that “whoever becomes president will officially recognize that as the only democracy in the Mideast, Israel is our only true ally.”
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