I am Kyle's self-indulgence

I'm excited about the presidential election this year in a way that I've been excited about no other election before.

For one thing, I actually love one of the candidates. Usually I have to settle for whatever bland, middle-of-the-road choice the Democratic party makes, but this time I actually get to vote for a dynamic leader who I agree with on nearly every issue. I genuinely think Obama is exactly what the country needs right now.

I also think Obama is what voters want. After eight years of unnecessary war, government corruption, and a dismal economy, people are desperate for something new. Obama ought to be the winner on every single major issue. All that stands between him and the presidency is five months of misleading political ads, vacuous TV commentators, and inevitable character assassinations.

But even in the dirty reality of political campaigns things look brighter for Obama than they did for previous Democratic candidates. I remembered recently something I learned from a college history professor. The recent trend in politics is for presidents to come from executive branches of government, rather than legislative.

It started with Jimmy Carter, who presented himself as a humble governor of Georgia and therefore a Washington outsider. He was followed by Ronald Reagan, former governor of California; George Bush I, Reagan's vice president; Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas; and of course George Bush II, governor of Texas. Not one of them was a senator before becoming president.

The reason for this trend is pretty simple. Candidates who come from Senate careers have long voting records to deal with. As we saw with John Kerry in 2004, pundits have all kinds of ways to use a voting record against a candidate: counting votes on bills, amendments, and even procedural movements to come up with inflated figures on how often someone voted for tax increases (or failed to vote for tax cuts). Numbers lie, and when you're dealing with something as complex as Senate procedure, the numbers can be made to lie in ways most of us can't even comprehend.

So what does this have to do with the 2008 election? For the first time in decades we have two candidates from the Senate, which means they are on equal footing. Neither one has the advantage that the governor-presidents have enjoyed for so long. But also, Obama is relatively new, and so does not carry as much of a voting record burden, especially when it comes to the crucial vote to invade Iraq, whereas John McCain has been a congressman since 1982.