Tonight after we had watched a bit of The Daily Show, and had laughed about McCain’s tacit assertion that Barack Obama is a communist, my wife turned to me and said, “You know my dad is worried about Obama ’spreading the wealth.’” My heart sank to hear it; I’ve been riding on a wave of happiness about politics for the the first time in eight years, and hearing that someone in my family feels that way can hurt. I started to tell her what I might tell him: that our progressive tax code ’spreads the wealth’ anyway, as tax codes are supposed to; that this isn’t some plot to separate him from his precious money. That wasting your life waiting for the commies to pop out from around every corner is thoughtless, and that greed doesn’t really jive with all the religion I have to hear about at gatherings on that side of the family.

But you know what? I don’t care.

I uttered about a sentence before I gave up, and decided I wouldn’t make my wife her father’s proxy. I know Barack Obama isn’t a socialist, because I know actual socialists who would laugh him out of the room if ’spreading the wealth’ was the best he had for them. I also know that all these slanders are really just code for “I cannot vote for a black man.” That’s sad, and sickening. It’s even worse when you consider my father-in-law lives half an hour away from the motel where they killed Martin Luther King, Jr. But it will always be this way for the right wing. It never gets old, convincing people that Democrats are really just communists. Before that we were race-mixers, integrators, suffragettes, elites, and a whole host of other epithets unfit to print.

Today a friend of mine forwarded an email to me that she’d been sent. It was from someone she has to see as her boss from the hours of nine to five everyday. It contained the same hate and vitriol, not merely suggesting but insisting that Barack Obama is a terrorist. As I read it I could feel my face go white with rage. I started to dream up ways that she could get revenge. But then I stopped myself. Even though I wrote her an email with some suggested come-uppance, the worst I could imagine was replying that she would be donating twenty-five dollars to the Obama campaign for every pro-McCain email she received.

I’m sure my father in law would be shocked, but the only place I ever learned what one might mistake for “religious tolerance” was from the liberals he sees in his nightmares. And as a part time carpenter I’ve heard about once said, it’s time to turn the other cheek. There is so much work to be done, and you and I know it’s not the work of turning this country we love and have wept over for eight long years into a socialist utopia. It’s the work of repair and outreach, here and abroad. This work is bigger than being right. The best revenge that we can possibly seek on the right wing now is to grant them eight years of a two term Obama presidency where their investments are safe, their children are educated and cared for, their homes are theirs to keep, and their jobs are waiting for them every Monday morning. That’s why I’m voting the way I am next Tuesday. I hope if you read this that you’ll join me.