Still, it was a reach — psychologically as well as financially. I don’t belong to a country club or any other kind of snooty social in-group. My daughter goes to public school. Buying these seats didn’t quite feel like me. For a while I had an investment-banker boyfriend who’d bought charter seats, the expensive ones on the elite club level, the minute they became available. One day during a fight he reached into his briefcase and waved his new charter contracts in front of me, as if to say, Don’t you want to be around to get a piece of this? It was more endearing than it sounds now, but I guess the answer was no; we broke up soon afterward.

As 2000 approached, I realized I couldn’t rely on a man: I’d have to get my own seats. It hurt. For the seats I wanted — lower box, not the best but still great — the charter “seat license” alone was $3,000 a seat, plus another $1,900 for the season tickets — almost $10,000 for the two-seat package. My best friend and I figured we could each afford a quarter of that, and eventually we found four friends who’d each take an eighth.

But as it came time to finalize our decision, my exhilaration fought with fear and a certain kind of guilt. The San Francisco media has been full of stories about lifelong Giants fans shut out of tickets this year by all the dot-com assholes whose companies have bought season tickets but are probably too busy to go. Hey, that sounds like me.

Plus, the stadium’s private financing means the team had to sell off every inch of it to the highest bidder for sponsorships. Pac Bell bought the park’s name before the stadium was even born, and as it went up people began complaining about the big Coke bottle in left center field, the Old Navy mascot, the dot-com ads everywhere.

But the uncertain future of my favorite Giant, manager Dusty Baker, was the source of my biggest doubt about investing in the Giants’ new park. Baker is the spiritual leader of the gritty, blue-collar, Candlestick Park Giants I loved in the 1990s. For seven years he took a mid-payroll team, no stars save Barry Bonds, and made them fearless baseball warriors, and frequently playoff contenders. He was twice named National League manager of the year.

As 1999 closed it was clear that the Giants’ owners weren’t doing enough to sign him, though his contract runs out at the end of 2000. It began to worry and annoy me that after all the team’s owners had done to build a solid foundation at Pac Bell Park, they were putting the future at risk by failing to lock up Baker.

But that’s me. I worry too much. I have problems with commitment. In the end I paid my almost $2,500 to own a piece of the park. Though as the season opener approached I was still afraid that I’d be disappointed, that I wouldn’t like the park, or the fans, or worse yet, the team the Giants ultimately assembled to play in the shiny new baseball-boutique by the bay.

As usual, a lot of my worries were for nothing. Pac Bell Park is a glorious cathedral of baseball. A co-worker and I walked to our first game, the opening pre-season bout with the Milwaukee Brewers, about a mile hike from our office downtown. You traverse grimy Third Street, which sneaks under the freeway (where the homeless still live), genuflects at the new ball field and then, fittingly, stretches all the way south to Candlestick Park.

Just as the streets get more crowded, Pac Bell suddenly rises up in front of you. That first game, my friend and I were awestruck, speechless, like pilgrims at the end of a long journey. Twenty-four palm trees wave above Willie Mays Plaza (in honor of his uniform number, 24). Lights around their bases illuminate the trees as they surround the tall bronze statue of Mays out front.

In bronze Mays is not quite 30, and he’s just hit a home run. His lithe, powerful body is at the end of a mighty swing; the bat is falling away, still cradled in his last three fingers (Mays worked with the sculptor to get the release right), and he’s looking skyward like all great transcendents. There is not another stadium in America with so majestic an entrance.

I have little quibbles. The Giants cut corners, literally, on space, parking the stadium on a tiny plot of land hanging over the bay. That leads to a certain funkiness — a wild jutting fence in right field, for instance. Plus, the walkways behind the seats are way too narrow. At Coors Field in Denver and Camden Yards in Baltimore, also designed by HOK Associates, the promenades are huge, and the food concessions are placed so that their lines don’t interfere with foot traffic. At Pac Bell, the concessions line both sides of the promenade, so the popcorn line snakes out into the walkway till it runs into the hot-dog line on the opposite wall. Voilà! Gridlock.

And yes, the corporate sponsorship was a little over the top. There are ads everywhere. Even the cup holders attached to the seats have Webvan stickers wrapped around them. I tried to scold my young friend and co-worker who, that first night, peeled off two of the stickers and marked our seats with them to write a note to our partners who had tickets for the next night’s exhibition against the New York Yankees. It was the park’s first act of vandalism! It was one of my favorite moments. But I’m happy to say that when I showed up opening day the stickers were where he left them — maintenance Nazis hadn’t stripped them off. They’re my seats, after all.

But, to my surprise, I loved the people in my section. Despite my worries, they’re more or less just like me — avid Giants lovers without trust funds, who split the charter fee with lots of their friends and share the season tickets. The handful of jerks with the nerve to talk loudly on cell phones at the early games were booed as rudely as at Candlestick. It seems the riffraff — the investment bankers and dot-com jerks (the ones who, unlike me, have made big money) — are confined to the club section just above mine, where they have their own bars and restaurants, plus a business center where they can work and watch the game.

I’d be remiss if I ignored one other demographic change: Men outnumber women by about a 2-1 ratio, vastly more than at Candlestick. The feminist in me, who is disturbed, fights with the flirt in me, who had a great time. But it also made me proud I’d purchased a piece of the park. I was chatting with a stockbroker who asked if my great seats were “one-day seats,” a term I heard several times, meaning they were borrowed or bought but weren’t your own season tickets. When I said no, he pressed me: Were they my company’s? My boss’s? My boyfriend’s? His shock and admiration at the news they were mine made me realize a woman needs season tickets of her own.

But Opening Day didn’t resolve my biggest worry: How will all the luxury affect my gutsy, blue-collar baseball team? After a week in the new park, the Giants have yet to win a game. They were swept three straight by the loathsome Los Angeles Dodgers, who hadn’t swept a series in San Francisco since 1981 — when Dusty Baker was a Dodgers outfielder. They lost two to the Arizona Diamondbacks, and when the third game was rained out, it felt like a mercy. Unbelievably, in that first week, I saw the first two rainouts of my entire life, plus a visit to the new ballpark by President Clinton, but I have yet to see a win.

It’ll be OK, I tell myself. It just doesn’t feel like home yet. The fans seem distracted — hell, I am. We dropped the home opener and I didn’t really care; I was grooving on the sun and the people and the incredible view of the bay. When the next night’s game was suspended by rain, I wasn’t that unhappy either — I was hanging with my friends in the less-crowded promenade, drinking beer and eating garlic fries, watching folks talk on cell phones while a few Candlestick hooligans jumped the fences and slid on the big white tarps.

It wasn’t until I watched the third game on television that I began to obsess. The fans are distracted — on TV I could see entirely too many cell phones behind home plate, and too many people milling around talking to their friends. Plus, some of those sacred field box seats emptied fairly early in the game. The stands are a little too full of people there for the spectacle, who neither know nor care much about baseball.

The players seem distracted, too, flat and fretful, too small for their new park. And I’m back to worrying about Baker’s lack of a contract. Through the Giants-fan grapevine — friends of friends of friends who know him — comes word he’s unhappy with the Giants’ latest offer (no shock since he hasn’t signed it), and other teams are known to be after him. Put him on top of the talent-rich but dysfunctional Dodgers — who’ve in the past expressed keen interest in their former All-Star — and they’d own the National League.

Players profess not to be worried about their manager’s future. “The Giants owners are smart baseball people,” outfielder Ellis Burks told me during spring training. “They’ll sign Dusty. They’ve just been distracted getting the new park open.”

Understandable. We’ve all been distracted. But it’s time to get serious. I’m hoping the Giants’ slow start will discourage the thrill seekers and hangers-on. The stadium’s sold out, but maybe some of the riffraff won’t bother showing up when the team comes back to town next weekend. I’m looking forward to a cold and windy Friday night, a Candlestick special. We’ll put down our cell phones, stop gawking at the views and just play baseball.

At a time when top Republicans are calling on him to reach out to McCain and heal the breach within the party, Bush used the Times interview as a platform to effectively flip McCain off.

Asked whether the Arizona senator’s run changed his views in any way, Bush answered airily, “No, not really.” Reminded that McCain had spurred a record turnout in many primaries, Bush snapped sarcastically, “Well, then, how come he didn’t win?” He’s baaaaack: the George W. whose mother wouldn’t sit him next to Queen Elizabeth when she visited the White House, fearing his sarcasm and loose tongue.

Times interviewers Richard Berke and Frank Bruni put it best: “Despite the bruising, bitter and sometimes humbling nature of his primary campaign against Mr. McCain, the Texas governor emerged from the experience without any regrets about his campaign’s conduct, any second thoughts about his strategy or any new resolves for the way he positions himself for the general election.” Can you say “entitlement”?

Bush wasn’t much nicer to Berke and Bruni than to McCain. Asked whether he was concerned about polls showing his $483 billion tax-cut proposal was unpopular with voters, Bush got snippy: “May I make something really clear to you, once again, and I hope this pleases you. I don’t care what the polls say. I don’t.”

Bush and his advisors don’t get it: The Texas governor is running against himself. With his $70 million war chest, he has had to fight the notion, popular with the press and voters alike, that he’s the black-sheep son of a mediocre president, who coasted on his name through Andover, Yale and Harvard, can’t account for his 20s, failed ever upwards in the oil industry throughout his 30s and 40s and finally decided to devote himself to the family business, politics.

Bush hasn’t been a bad governor of Texas, and on some issues, like education, he’s been a good one. Still, on his bad days, and he can’t afford many more, he exudes arrogance and entitlement, and even on his good days he suffers from a kind of happy-go-lucky, son-of-privilege insouciance that just doesn’t look right in the man running for the toughest job in the world.

But Bush doesn’t seem to care. And that makes some people wonder if he’s serious enough about this president business. There’s something a little over-determined about this goofy 53-year-old trying to get his dad’s old job. He’s running to avenge his father’s loss to the evil Clinton-Gore empire, but it’s not too hard to imagine he resents that family responsibility as well.

Whenever Bush talks tough, I find myself thinking about the knucklehead George W. who, at 27, drunkenly picked a fight with his father: “I hear you want a piece of me. You wanna go mano a mano?” And sometimes I think losing to Gore would let Bush have it both ways: He can live up to family expectations by running for president, and evade them by losing in November.

The photos that ran with the Times interview tell an even better story. Bush is sitting in a big comfy brocade chair in his beloved Austin governor’s mansion, the one he got homesick for on the campaign trail. There are logs next to the cozy fireplace beside his chair, a tall glass of water on a nearby table.

Jug-eared, frowning, his hands out in a “take it or leave it” pose, Bush looks happy there, in his Austin terrarium, with his cats and his own pillow to sleep on, his baseball memorabilia and his buddies around him. It was in Texas, after all, that he did the one thing his father never could: He became a Texan, and it would make sense if he doesn’t want to leave.

On Thursday Bush was in deep damage-control, explaining on an Illinois campaign visit: “I appreciate the hard campaign that John McCain waged. He ran a good race. He highlighted the need for reform, and I appreciate the ideas that he brought forth in the campaign.” But it was a day too late. We’re all left with the picture of the Texas titan in his comfy den, the poor winner who doesn’t seem to want the presidency enough to be gracious in victory. At this rate he’ll be heading back there in November, no doubt a gracious loser, just like his dad.

To a devout Catholic girl — I grew up reading the lives of the saints, wanting to be a nun or a missionary — the civil rights movement was the struggle of good and evil written quite literally in black and white, a story from the pages of my saints books come to life. Wanting so desperately to be good, choosing sides was easy. I was good; I was black Irish; I was not white, not really.

It would take me 30 years, two careers, motherhood and a broken heart to accept the obvious: I am white, sort of. (Though the new census, which allows people to mark more than one box, intrigues me, because it might make for a more complicated racial reckoning.) But I became white just in time to become a minority in California, so strangely, little has changed for me: I’m still watching a mulatto country trying to eradicate some racial boundaries and hierarchies while enforcing certain others. Even more confusing, today I find that the vocal racial purists are as likely to be black, Latino or Asian as white. Each group has at least one thing in common, though: Our rhetoric about race can’t even come close to capturing our mixed-up reality.

What’s most amazing is how much our black and white racial paradigm — victim vs. victimizer, the patron and the patronized — still prevails. And yet it’s an outdated script, reducing Asians, Latinos and the growing number of multiracial Americans either to bit players in our national drama or a vast army of victims (an identity most non-white Americans viscerally reject). But many of us cling to the paradigm, because we have no other way of envisioning racial relationships. I know that I myself clung way too long to a black-white, good-evil motif, obsessed with the possibility of racial retribution and redemption more than justice.

I was a type, a stereotype even, and a walking paradox: a civil rights do-gooder motivated by racial animus against my group — in short, a self-hating white person. Not all Caucasians in the struggle are the same, but over the years I ran across a lot of me. And the fact that mixed-up white folk are the most likely to get involved with civil rights work results in a deformed political culture, one in which there is little white participation in our national conversation about race beyond the right-wing scapegoating of a Pat Buchanan and the masochistic piety of guilty Mumia cultists on the left. Meanwhile, the coming white minority is getting little help in developing a language for its changing and legitimate concerns.

It took me a long time to come to terms with this, but after an adulthood spent believing I was part of the solution to racial strife, I finally came to admit I was part of the problem.

My views on race were an odd fusion of early childhood Catholicism and adolescent rebellion. I was a misfit in my extended family, whose working-class Irish racism clashed with my college-educated father’s tolerance. Plus, we all suffered from the Irish Catholic dysfunction Frank McCourt has made a clichi, but set on Long Island, not in Limerick: alcoholism, bad fortune and early death, borne with stoicism, denial, love badly expressed and more alcohol. I grew up and, especially after my mother died, exiled myself from my ignoble heritage, and all the loss.

But it wasn’t until my father died, too, about a dozen years ago, that I got the first useful clues about the source of my lifelong affinity with black people. Hideously depressed, I started doing consulting work on poverty and race issues, going to work for a black-led anti-poverty group in Oakland, Calif., and after feeling like an outsider at every job I had ever had, I finally felt at home.

Now the cause of my comfort seems obvious: Black people have a cosmology of suffering, a culture that makes sense of injustice and misfortune. White people in trouble are shit out of luck, stuck with a culture that acts like bad fortune is not just deserved, but contagious. Every black person knows in their soul that life is deeply unfair, while a remarkable number of white people skate through most of their lives unscathed, unmarked, unaware of the stacked hand they’ve been dealt. And I have always hated them.

I think hate may have had more to do with my racial views than love, but for a long time that didn’t matter: I thrived in my new world. I grew up there. After years working in white lefty organizations that only fed my ambivalence about success and achievement, I found myself surrounded by ambitious, accomplished peers, most of whom happened to be black. They liberated me to want more, do more, dress better and have more fun doing it. I was shielded from white girl guilt because it was all in the service of a higher goal: civil rights, social justice, uplift of the poor.

Emotionally, what I got from my new world bordered on the hackneyed: damaged white person finds solace and redemption through warmer, darker folk. But that’s not it, exactly. I got a lot of nuts and bolts survival skills: silence instead of talking all the time. Strategy. Looking behind the surface of things. Patience and perseverance. Perspective. The long view. It was my black friends, ironically, who focused me on how much my Irish family gave me, for instance, and jolted me out of my white self-pity and shame about what they didn’t.

It’s hard to believe now, but for a stretch of time — years even — I didn’t think about being white. Partly it’s that my friends were sane, kind people — a little nationalism here, some misguided Afrocentrism there — but mostly I was welcomed. Occasionally, though, I found myself thinking about my lone black friend in high school, who was one of the lone blacks in our town, period. He was always being told by jerky classmates not to be hurt by racist comments, because “you’re one of the good ones.” No one ever said that to me, but they didn’t have to — I knew I was one of the good ones, and only occasionally felt the outsider.

In fact, the worst culture clash was crossing back, whenever I had to see my extended family. It almost got ugly a few years ago, when I travelled for a meeting on urban poverty to a city where my once favorite cousin, formerly a hippie and artist, is now a cop. I never call him when I go there, but this one time I do, and we meet — where else? — in a bar; the first of many, with his cop partner and the partner’s girlfriend. Suddenly they start talking about “the niggers” and telling racist jokes, but my cousin stops them, gallantly, like he’d protect another girl cousin from locker room jokes. “You can’t talk like that in front of my cousin,” he starts, but he runs out of words at their look of shock. They’re mystified, waiting for an explanation. What could possibly be the reason they can’t talk that way in front of me?

He jokes: “She’s married to a black man!”

“That’s right,” I agree calmly.

But now my cousin panics; the joke has bombed. Nobody is laughing.

“No she’s not! She just doesn’t like jokes like that; she never has, even when she was a kid.”

The other cop shuts up, chivalrous if contemptuous, but the girlfriend finishes the joke, testing me. And I glare at her with deep disgust. I hate these people and then I hate myself for hating them. I’m a self-hating white person in an Irish bar. My cousin’s racist friends are paying for my drinks. I have more than a few.

Finally they leave and my cousin and I begin a kind of ritual lament: What happened to our family? Boy, did a lot of people die! Why did everybody drink so much? I tell him how I’ve always felt like an outcast, too smart, too awkward, with a righteous liberal father and a mother who died too young; not quite part of the family. He’s not entirely surprised; I think we’ve been over it before, drunk and maudlin in some other bar, but I can’t really remember. He says what I think he always says: You’re my cuz. (Like a lot of white cops he talks black, throwing around “cuz” and “bro”and “blood” not even ironically anymore.) I love you, he continues. I’d do anything for you.

What I want him to do is not be racist, and I drunkenly try to accomplish this. He tells me he didn’t start out racist; working on the street made him that way. I explain to him exactly the kind of work I do — the writing about welfare and poverty and urban education, the friends I have of every race — like I’m confessing to some double life. I say that if he lived in my world he’d see things differently: I have black friends — get this! — who are smarter than me. They have nicer homes. Their kids are better behaved than mine.

He says if I lived in his world I’d see things differently too. He sees black drug dealers, wife beaters, killers. Drunk and distraught, I finish with my trump: “My black friends are incredible people. They would do anything for me. And they have better families than we do!” He really can’t believe this; he has a hunch it could be true. At about 5 a.m. we stagger back to my hotel and I pass out.

He calls me the next morning, thoughtfully, to make sure I wake up in time for my meeting with my black friends to talk about racism and poverty. He tells me he loves me. But the next time I see him, a few months later, at a family reunion right after the O.J. Simpson acquittal, it’s clear something has changed between us. The acquittal has most of my family furious, with that white sense of vulnerability and grievance the O.J. verdict catalyzed nationally. Somebody notes darkly that white prosecutor Marcia Clark is dating black prosecutor Christopher Darden.

“You must love that,” my cousin sneers at me. And there it is: that old racial fear, that the civil rights movement was just a cover for black men to run off with white women, finally spoken aloud.

And he was right: By that time I was involved with a black man, somebody I’d met through my work. When I started in the field I was married, and I would chuckle when black female colleagues jokingly complained about the white women in our work who dated black. They weren’t talking about me. I had a husband, and he was white (Jewish, for the record, which my ex didn’t consider white, but my black friends mostly did).

But once I was divorced, as I got deeper into the work — meeting a lot of great young professionals, forming new organizations, traveling and socializing — it seems inevitable that I’d wind up with someone black. I didn’t mean to; we were colleagues, then casual friends and then suddenly it was more than that. He pursued me; at first, I resisted. I say that not out of pride but to explain why, after a few months, I was shocked when he confessed that our relationship could of course never go anywhere, because I was white. He wasn’t proposing ending it; just giving me a heads up that it could never be permanent, or even terribly public. Furious, I ended it, then took him back, and the drama went on for over a year.

Looking back, it was the best thing that ever happened to me — the rejection, that is, not the drama. It shook me out of my naive idolization of black people and my hopeless flight from myself. But it took me a year to accept it, because it was so far out of my experience: We, people like him and me, were about bringing down racial barriers, not enforcing them. I literally thought this was part of my work, creating the new post-race America. Sure, I knew about black men who didn’t date white women, but I didn’t think I knew anyone stupid enough to be a dating nationalist — let alone that I was sleeping with one.

Plus, there was an ease between us, a strange instant intimacy, that confirmed my intuition that this was meant to be. I’d briefly dated black men before, without having this feeling, so I was sure the connection had nothing to do with race. Now, I’m not so certain. I think for a while I felt hugely liberated, stepping out of the boundaries and conventions of my culture and my family, to be, simply, myself — what we all want in a love affair and so infrequently get.

And while I adored my father, I avoided men who reminded me in any way of his Irish Catholic passivity, his insistence on seeing only good in the world and his inability to fight back against what’s bad. What better way to avoid him than to date someone black? Of course, in the end, the black man I fell for, with his obeisance to the needs of his “community” and his endless dithering about our relationship, reminded me of nobody more than my father.

But during my year-long struggle to make the relationship work, I was weirdly, manically happy. I was on a mission. The personal most definitely had become political. I wasn’t just trying to win this man’s heart but save his soul. The 6-year-old Catholic girl within could not let him commit the mortal sin of racial prejudice. In our fights about our future, I found a new white sense of grievance, and felt liberated to call him on his reflexive, anti-white attitudes. One thing that had actually bugged me early and often in civil rights work was the tendency to lump together “people of color” as automatic heroes, and to leave whites out of coalitions around education and urban reform. I started objecting to it, first with him, then in larger groups.

And there were small victories along the way: He left my bed one April 4, the anniversary of King’s murder, to do a morning radio show on race relations. I listened in, still under the covers, as he issued a call to change. He included “people of color,” but then corrected himself and welcomed “progressive people of all colors” to join the struggle. I settled back into pillows that still smelled of him, feeling briefly vindicated.

It didn’t last. And my reaction when it ended for good still shames me. Amend the old saying to read: Hell hath no fury like a white woman scorned for her race. I felt like our break-up was a political issue, and I expected our friends to support me — even forcing some of them to choose between us. Most did, but what stings is the number of black friends who didn’t. At least a couple of supposed friends stopped speaking to me, angry that I’d turned out to be just another white woman chasing the black man, and with the nerve to be mad at him when it didn’t work. His social life continued unchanged, of course, while I was no longer invited to certain parties. I got a taste of the racism in the black community that says white folks are all right, but you wouldn’t want your brother to marry one.

And I was mad. Really, really, really mad. I latched on to my sense of grievance as a distraction from my broken heart. I had a political issue here. Finally I was a winner in that popular 1990s game (too bad Regis didn’t think to MC it): “Who Wants to be a Victim.”

Eventually I got over it. But when the storm passed, I was a new woman: I wasn’t a self-hating white person anymore.

This, of course, is the best thing I could do for black people, who naturally stumble under the burden whites like me place on them — to be both the victims we save, we white saviors, and the saints who redeem us, the suffering white sinners. This is not a healthy relationship.

But the experience made me realize just how big a problem it is that whites like me are the most likely to care about and work on race relations issues. Just as there are black people who fit themselves into white settings by assenting to the conventional group wisdom and avoiding confrontation, so there is a type of white person who works on racial issues, who bites her tongue when a line is crossed from truth to demagoguery, or from justice to retribution, for fear of reminding everyone that she is white. Angry, wounded, we are exiles, misfits in our own group, looking for a place to belong, and often we ourselves are more into retribution than justice, anyway.

After my wake-up call, finally resigned to being white, I started speaking out against the casual, mindless anti-white racism I had always ignored. We’re not talking Klan violence here. The vast majority of the people I worked with weren’t racist. But there was a fairly common, reflexive use of white as an epithet — white politician, white funder, white teacher — without modifier or qualifier. White had become shorthand for “arrogant, ignorant, out of touch.” I began to say a polite “Excuse me?” when I heard these casual slights, the way my black friends did at white insensitivity.

And I had a few arguments. I remember fighting to include the problems of white kids in a youth initiative that was designed to focus on Asians, Latinos and blacks — as though white youth are well-served by our bankrupt, sclerotic public bureaucracies and schools. I’ve defended Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown against charges that his crusade to clean up Oakland is racist: One thing working in Oakland taught me is that black political power doesn’t equal black advancement, and I no longer pay much attention to race when voting.

And I’m on the verge of becoming a crackpot when confronted with attempts to invoke a grand “people of color” coalition against whites. Early in my awakening I quarreled with an Asian-American colleague who formed a “people of color caucus” inside a do-gooder group that was white-led, but mainly comprising minorities. Why do that, I asked him — cautiously, nervously — why exclude white colleagues and allies, especially when they were the minority? Was there a program goal? He was silent for a moment, then angry. “We’ve been excluded for so long — they should know how it feels.”

Indeed. Revenge has come to seem like the motive behind a lot of civil rights policy. There’s always been a tinge of payback and retribution, for instance, in the way school integration, affirmative action and other civil rights measures were implemented — mostly at the expense of poor and working-class whites — and until recently I didn’t care. Probably, as a self-hating white person, I liked it. But with hindsight it’s easy to understand the racial unraveling of the last 20 years.

Affirmative action, to take one example, was always an imperfect way of distributing opportunity, but it made sense in a time of optimism and perceived abundance. In a time of scarcity and contraction, it became predictably divisive. Likewise, we moved to provide public education to all children — often forced by the courts to do so — without hugely expanding education spending, which sometimes meant taking from kids who had and giving to kids who didn’t. (There’s no room to discuss the idiocy of forced busing, except to say that just like forced anything, it only affected those without other options.) Now that the pie is expanding again, maybe the nation is ready for new remedies, but this time they should be far less about race and more about class and inclusion.

It must be said that my rehabilitation from white self-hatred probably started with the birth of my daughter, a blond Irish-Jewish tomboy who has always been drawn to black kids. Now, being a parent in an urban public school, I see how little public education is working for any ethnic group. In most classrooms, understaffed and oversized, conformity is valued over education, and kids who are different, whatever race, get the shaft. But our advocacy groups are divided into identity and interest subsets, which tend to fight among themselves, and thus the true shame of our cities — their unforgivably bad public schools — reach critical mass.

In the end, it’s my daughter who’s showed me the way out of our zero-sum racial blame game. In preschool, coming out of the December-January holiday season, she described her ethnicity in terms of celebrations: she was Hanukkah and Christmas, Kwanzaa and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. At about 6 she told me if she was part-Jewish, I was part-Jewish, since I was her mother. And instead of lecturing her that no one can be part Jewish (or breaking the bad news that because her mom isn’t Jewish, some Orthodox Jews will say she couldn’t be Jewish if she chose to be), I agreed with her. I’ve always felt part Jewish, what the hell; I’m part Jewish. Now we light the menorah at my house, too.

And recently I shared with her my father’s story about the black Irish. She broke into a big grin, part mischief, part wonder. “I’m black, too! I’m black! I can’t wait to tell Marquice!” She ran off to tell her half-black, half-Mexican friend. But her reaction made me think: When the census form comes to our house next month, what box — or boxes — will I check? I’ve got a subversive urge — part mischief, part wonder — to check white and “other.” If my tortured journey toward racial understanding has taught me anything, it’s that we all need to get out of our boxes.

Of course, McCain and I are no love connection, either. My presidential personal ad would read:
Divorced white female voter; mom, nonsmoker and lifelong Democrat (with a few conservative
kinks), seeks good man or woman. Pro-choice, pro-gun control, into public education and the environment, likes long walks through civil rights museums and politicians who know what the meaning of “is” is.

And though McCain only scores on the last count — he’s compulsively honest, fessing up unasked
to cheating on his first wife — I was, for a moment, ready to give him my vote. And I’m not
alone. Across the nation, Democrats and independents are falling for the war hero turned senator.

He’s certainly won the hearts of the constituency most pilloried as liberal, the media. Newsweek’s
Jonathan Alter calls the race for reporters’ affection “the nation’s first primary,” and says McCain
worked it like an Irish pol in South Boston on St. Patrick’s Day.

And here I was falling for McCain myself, and I’d never even met this political heartthrob in person. It was time for some bracing re-education, in the form of a walk through his voting record and actual positions, to try to answer the question: Can a liberal really vote for John McCain?

But first, a soapbox moment: There are two excellent reasons to switch sides and vote for McCain, at least in California. My burning desire to register Republican came as much from my hatred of the state’s party bosses as any affinity for McCain. After California voted to open its presidential primary in 1996, Democratic and Republican leaders, led by liberal machine boss State Sen. John Burton of San Francisco (another good reason to vote Republican), subverted the ballot measure and made sure pesky voters couldn’t interfere with each party’s process of anointing, rather than electing, its preferred nominee.

So now, on March 7, Democrats can vote for Republicans in the primary, and vice versa, but when it comes to divvying up delegates, only the votes of registered Democrats and Republicans will be counted. McCain could win the popular vote, for instance, but lose to party boy Bush in the delegate count, and thus lose the state. Sounds like Cuba, not California. While New York’s attempt to rig the primary got lots of ink, ours is far more sinister. Anyone who changes party registration, in whichever direction, to subvert this so-called election will be a hero.

The second reason to vote for McCain is to enjoy the spectacle of the party of big money being forced to nominate a candidate who opposes big money. This is big fun. Lots of Republican bosses would rather lose with Bush than win with McCain, and I can’t help wanting to be part of any movement that makes Republican titans — like Sens. Trent Lott and Mitch McConnell — as well as that devout Buddhist fund-raiser Al Gore squirm. Never mind that McCain’s taken money from big business himself, and isn’t completely clean on the issue: Nobody is, and his
proposals to take money out of politics are arguably the best thing going on this election year.

Yet, despite the New Republic’s best efforts to say otherwise in Jonathan Chait’s provocative but unconvincing McCain profile “This Man is NOT a Republican,”
Democrats who vote for McCain must do so with the sober awareness that they’re voting for a right-winger. But most seem anything but sober. McCain’s Democratic buddies are apparently guided by a hunch that’s a twist on the slogan of his Arizona homeboy Barry Goldwater: In your heart,
you know he’s … not really right.

But they’re wrong.

Chait could be right about one thing: McCain may be a work in progress (aren’t we all?), evolving
away from the Goldwater certainties of his early career to a kind of centrism. But the evidence of
that conversion is thin. That analysis mostly comes down to this: Conservatives are dorks, and liberals are
cool. McCain is a cool guy, therefore he must be a liberal. Nobody like him would try to turn back
the clock on, say, abortion rights, would he?

But of course he would. Any time McCain’s been given a chance to act on abortion, he’s voted to
curb it. As Bruce Shapiro
recently described in Salon, McCain has voted to deny federal abortion funds to low-income
women, prohibit abortion at U.S. military bases overseas, and he supported a rider to an
international aid bill that blocked all global family-planning funding, not just for abortion. Last
year, he sponsored legislation that would have made it a felony to transport a woman under 18
across state lines to thwart parental-notification laws. Of 86 votes on abortion rights issues, he
voted the so-called pro-life line 82 times, according to the National Abortion Rights Action
League.

It’s true that last summer, while preparing for his presidential campaign, McCain told the San Francisco Chronicle that he wouldn’t support efforts to overturn Roe vs. Wade because it would drive
pregnant women to “illegal and dangerous operations.” But he quickly backtracked on the
statement, and reaffirmed his support for reversing Roe. To his relative credit, he has pushed a
big-tent Republicanism on the issue, refuses to make opposing abortion a litmus test for his vice
president or Supreme Court nominees, and was brave enough to suggest the Republican Party
platform be amended to allow abortion in cases of rape or incest, which the cowardly Bush won’t
back. The National Right to Life Committee has repaid him by running attack ads in South
Carolina (though they’re madder about his drive to ban soft money than his few conciliatory
gestures on abortion). But even though only 14 percent of Americans polled want to see abortion
illegal, McCain has chosen to play to them, at least for the primaries.

He’s had a similar failure of nerve on South Carolina’s Confederate flag. The first time the issue
came up, the straight-talking McCain got it at least partly right: He called the flag “a symbol of
slavery,” though he said whether it flew or not was a decision best left to the state. Soon after that
he reversed himself on this crucial issue, just as he did on Roe vs. Wade, and defended the flag as
“a symbol of heritage.” At the time I wondered if the Arizonan knew “heritage” was a Southern
code word for rehabilitating the Confederacy, slavery and all.

Then I learned: Of course he did, because his key South Carolina strategist, Richard Quinn, is
editor-in-chief of Southern Partisan magazine — kind of a Southern Living for Confederacy lovers,
except for all those nasty articles about that race traitor, Abe Lincoln — and a paid consultant
behind the effort to keep the flag flying. To me, McCain’s keeping Quinn on his payroll is even
worse than his flip-flopping on the flag itself.

The list goes on. Though he’s been called “moderate” on social issues, he opposes many gay-rights measures. His environmental record is weak. And while he may offer straight talk about adultery, he’s had a forked tongue on key policy issues. He says he supports
the conservative flat-tax proposal, but doesn’t think it should apply to Bill Gates and some guy
who makes $30,000 a year (memo to McCain: that’s exactly what a flat tax would do). He wants
every American to have health insurance, but doesn’t want the government to pay for it, and gets
flustered when forced to talk specifics about health care issues.

On education, it’s Bush who is the liberal choice, because his proposals for demanding
accountability from run-amuck education bureaucracies and for closing the unconscionable
achievement gap between rich and poor, white and non-white, is the best news on the education front for a long time. Until recently, McCain’s only educational proposal was a school voucher experiment. For the right, school vouchers are the equivalent of the partial-birth abortion
issue, draining tons of political effort for a matter that will affect a tiny minority.

Conservatives like McCain would apparently rather fight teachers unions with the symbolic
vouchers issue — which will reach a small proportion of kids — than take on the tough
work of reforming public education. That would include taking on teachers unions, frankly, but
in a meaningful and not merely symbolic way — and in a way that would benefit millions of kids.
On Thursday, he tried to flesh out his education ideas, but the hodgepodge proposal only showed
his lack of experience on the issue.

So in the end, I flirted with John McCain, but I left my registration Democratic. I still don’t know how I’ll vote March 7. There’s not enough difference between Gore and Bill Bradley to send me running to the polls, and I still might vote for McCain hoping to shame party potentates with the spectacle of a popular vote victory for the insurgent, while the delegates go to Bush.

But if I do that, I’ll know it’s because I want McCain to embarrass hack politicians in both parties, not that I want him to be president.

Now, at last, she is ready to light out on her own. Just this month, she got to enjoy the thrill of stating the obvious — that her husband’s sellout gays-in-the-military policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” has been a tragic failure — and having the president a few days later second her emotion, while Al Gore chimed in behind them, promising he’d repeal it if elected president. At long last, Hillary gets to step out front and have the men in her political life fall in behind her. It doesn’t get any better than this.

But this time, can she succeed on her own? Politically, it’s not clear. Although her admirers have long said that the wrong Clinton went to the White House in 1992, voters may not agree. She lacks her husband’s child-of-an-alcoholic, approval-seeking charisma. She does not feel our pain. In college — a time when she tried on personas the way she would later try out hairdos, as though a character makeover were as easy as a cosmetic one — she decided to call herself a “compassionate misanthrope,” someone who cares about mankind but doesn’t much like individual people. The label clearly stuck. The big question in the New York Senate race is whether real, live voters will ever warm to her, or her to them.

Maybe most important, it’s still not clear, after all these years, what Hillary Clinton believes. The two biographies most recently published about her — liberal Gail Sheehy’s “Hillary’s Choice” and conservative Barbara Olson’s “Hell to Pay” — depict a political shape-shifter who metamorphosed from Goldwater Republican to acolyte of Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman in just a few years. And yet in 1996, as Edelman and other liberal friends agonized over how she could live with the man who signed the Republican welfare-reform bill, she told political consultant Dick Morris that her whiny pals needed to get over it, welfare reform had to happen and she wasn’t going to listen to their complaints anymore. In the New York Senate race, so far all we really know is that she’s not Rudy Giuliani (although she has a lot in common with the thin-skinned, self-righteous, martinet mayor). For the first time she’ll have to run on the merits of her own politics and policies, whatever they turn out to be.

But that’s what she allegedly wants. After decades of being seen in the reflected light or shadow of her screwed-up husband, Hillary is now asking to be judged on her own. When a National Review reporter, at her November almost-announcement of her candidacy, asked her if she still believed “a vast right-wing conspiracy” was behind her husband’s Monica Lewinsky troubles, she snapped, “I’m not going back, I’m going forward,” and wouldn’t answer. Her New York campaign guru, Harold Ickes, says, “This is a race for redemption. It’s really that simple — redemption.”

Ironically, the redemption of Hillary Clinton began with her humiliation by her husband last year. It was only when she was cruelly and publicly victimized that her humanity became real. Next year we’ll learn whether the independent Hillary will be redeemed or repudiated by New York voters. And if the past tells us anything about the future, it will be a long, uphill and unpredictable campaign.

If Hillary Clinton had been trailed by a photographer her whole life, she might seem a little like a female Forrest Gump: Somehow she’s been present at every defining moment of American liberal activism in the last 40 years. There she is in 1960, on the eve of the nation’s turn left, a dutiful young Republican harassing Hispanic girls in Chicago as she tries to ferret out the notorious voter fraud that helped elect John F. Kennedy. At 15, we find her shaking hands with Martin Luther King Jr. at a local church, her “small white hand … in his warm palm,” in Gail Sheehy’s oddly creepy words. (It’s not clear how Sheehy knew King’s hand was warm, except what else would a black man’s hand be; and at 15, was Hillary’s hand really much smaller than it is today?)

Fast forward to 1968 and she’s Wellesley’s senior-class president and commencement speaker, denouncing the “acquisitive and competitive corporate life” in favor of “more immediate, ecstatic … modes of living.” (An actual photo of her would appear that year in Life magazine, part of a feature on student leaders.) Now, here she is working with the legendary Saul Alinsky, the “Rules for Radicals” author and father of community organizing. She would turn down a job with Alinsky for Yale Law School and a summer internship with Black Panther lawyers in Oakland (where’s that photo with Huey Newton?), and eventually meet the future president.

But that’s not all: Next she goes to work for the congressional committee that investigated Watergate, where she had the job of listening to Nixon’s infamous Oval Office tapes. We can see her, headphones squeezed over long, unruly hair, eyes wide behind her big unflattering glasses, listening to Nixon himself describe what’s on the tapes, fired by her fervor to drive the wrongdoer from office, blissfully unaware of the role she would play in the country’s next impeachment drama.

Oblivious to the scandal that awaits her, she’s at times eerily prescient about the glory: She tells her boss at the committee, future White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, that the chubby hayseed she’s dating is going to be president some day. Nussbaum and her other Washington friends, understandably, don’t believe her. Her pal Sara Ehrman would later confide that she drove Hillary to Arkansas, to start her life with Bill Clinton, hoping the long ride would give her a chance to talk her friend out of career suicide. Of course she failed, and the rest is American history.

But that choice is the central mystery of Hillary’s life. Why did this brainy Yale feminist, witness to key turning points in the revolutionary 1960s and ’70s, who came of age during the heyday of the women’s movement, follow her philandering boyfriend to Arkansas and put her own promising career on hold? All these years later, it seems less like love than a monstrous failure of nerve, and Hillary Clinton’s 20-plus (count ‘em) biographers, not just Sheehy and Olsen, have not been able to explain it. For feminists like me who came a half-generation behind her, the choice has always seemed not just retro, but lazy, as though she wanted the perks of power without the sacrifices getting elected required.

And yet she sacrificed plenty, lashing herself to a self-destructive womanizer who risked both their futures on furtive and flagrant sex with countless females. As a governor’s wife, then as first lady, she’s had as much scrutiny, criticism and ridicule as her spouse, with almost none of the power; little credit but lots of blame. Clinton’s 1980 gubernatorial loss was attributed to her frumpy clothes, Yale snobbiness and failure to take her husband’s name; likewise Whitewater, with more reason, was seen as her fault more than his. And more than a few pundits and stand-up comedians have, without any reason, blamed the president’s compulsive tomcatting on what they see as her steely sexlessness.

Who can forget her humbling during the 1992 campaign, after she messed up with her catty “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies” remark, looking again like that snooty feminist who 12 years earlier cost her husband the governor’s race? She left the political stage briefly and came back looking more wifely, sitting for an interview with NBC’s Jane Pauley in a big-skirted coral dress that she could have borrowed from Donna Reed. She looked like she’d been drinking or crying — the ’50s housewife’s two safe harbors — and she seemed less demure than drugged. Her life has been a blur of hairdos and makeovers ever since. Her inability to settle on a look and make peace with herself points to the single thing that best explains her “choice”: a fundamental lack of self-knowledge and self-assurance that prevented her from defining her personal and political views and offering them up to the public for approval.

Gail Sheehy, good therapeutic liberal that she is, blames Hillary’s choice of a philandering husband over a political career on her domineering, impossible-to-please father, who withheld his love and approval, forcing Hillary to repeat the pattern with a withholding, unavailable husband. But her cheesy book, with its dime-store Jungianisms (Bill as puer aeternus, Hillary unable to connect with her “shadow” and dying the “little death” of middle age), takes a scary, fill-in-the-blanks approach to analysis: If Person A (marries a philanderer) she must have (had insufficient love and attention from her father). Yet Sheehy never examines the father-daughter relationship her book deems so crucial.

She makes much of her access to Dorothy Rodham, Hillary’s mother (whose revelations are only revealing in their emptiness), but doesn’t even question the now-dead Hugh, who sat forbiddingly in another room while Sheehy interviewed his wife in 1992. Did she ever try to talk to the man she accuses, with no evidence, of “sexually undermining” his daughter? It appears not, and the one intriguing fact that she “uncovered” — that he skipped Hillary’s shining moment, her Wellesley graduation — turns out not to be true.

So if we can’t blame Hillary’s dad for her choice to subsume her career under her husband’s, what was the cause? Barbara Olson, predictably, sees it as typical left-wing stealth and dishonesty, sly ol’ Hillary trying to hide her dreary Marxist politics behind her husband’s good-old-boy persona. Ironically, the right-wing Olson gives Hillary more political respect than the supposedly sympathetic Sheehy, who sacrifices political analysis for pop-psych platitudes and a disproportionate focus on Hillary’s hairstyles, clothing choices and, yes, the first bosom. (Acccording to Sheehy, Hillary has been showing a lot more of it as she comes into her own.)

Olson makes much of the short-lived Alinsky connection, opening every chapter with a quote from “Rules for Radicals,” most of which display the ruthless, opportunistic left-wing politics she thinks the Clintons personify. She reads her 1970s articles on children’s rights and takes them deadly seriously. But Olson gives Hillary too much credit for left-wing constancy. In reality, she’s stood for very little besides political survival, embracing with gusto the “triangulation” advised by Dick Morris, even as she personally disdained him.

Now on her own, running for Senate, Hillary is just another New York Democrat. Earlier this year she tried to soften her historic support for a Palestinian state by endorsing Israel’s claim to a unified Jerusalem as its capital, which even her weak-kneed husband won’t back. And where she once stood up to teachers’ unions in Arkansas, her New York coming-out party last month was at the United Federation of Teachers office in Manhattan. Those who’ve been clamoring to let Hillary be Hillary, as though she’d run as a true-blue liberal or have more integrity than her husband, will be disappointed. Like her husband, she will try to do whatever it takes to get elected; but unlike him, she lacks the instincts to know exactly what that is, and the needy drive to get it done.

Reading the two latest Clinton books, it’s impossible to miss the fact that her fingerprints are all over the biggest disasters of her husband’s presidency: Filegate, Travelgate, the health-care mess, Whitewater and maybe most important, the attempt to stonewall first the New York Times and later Kenneth Starr when the Clintons’ ties to all those shady Arkansas land deals were first being probed. Yes, the scandalousness of Whitewater was exaggerated, and yes, as Clinton supporters Gene Lyons and Salon’s Joe Conason have noted, Sheehy gets many details about the scandal wrong.

But it is also true that the supposedly left-wing Hillary Clinton was a self-dealing, influence-peddling corporate lawyer who traded on her husband’s power to enrich herself and her friends.

Her cattle futures bonanza — in which she turned an investment of $1,000 into a $100,000 windfall thanks to the insider investment tips of a political crony (and patience when her account was dangerously in arrears) — is a textbook case of probably legal, but undeniably sleazy, financial opportunism. If the biography of George W. Bush is a case study of the invidious ways the American political system is rigged to make sure the rich get richer and the powerful hold onto their power, so is Hillary Clinton’s.

Of course, both current Clinton biographies are nasty books by ambitious, competitive political women (who, like Hillary, have climbed thanks to their marriages to powerful men — Sheehy to New York magazine founder Clay Felker, Olson to right-wing legal luminary and Ken Starr buddy Ted Olson). To prove that bad news comes in threes, Peggy Noonan’s tract, “The Case Against Hillary Clinton,” will arrive in January. Given all the psycho-sexual projection Hillary has had to endure, it seems no accident that a gay man, David Brock, has written the most sympathetic biography so far, “The Seduction of Hillary Rodham.”

The meanness of these latest books makes me want to like Hillary Clinton, but I don’t. I’ve always felt bad about that, partly as a feminist and partly because I don’t know the woman personally, and such personal dislike seems unconscious, or at least thoughtless, a byproduct of what was a real right-wing conspiracy that took advantage of the Clintons’ real screw-ups to almost bring them down. Let Linda Tripp’s trial this week remind us that there truly was such a conspiracy, and Tripp was its omnipresent Forrest Grump — there in Vince Foster’s office when Clinton staffers removed his files, there as Monica Lewinsky’s loyal (and wired) confidante, even available to counsel Kathleen Willey about her crush on the president (amazingly, Tripp was outside the office where the president groped Willey, but on Clinton’s behalf she would describe that groping as consensual).

Hillary Clinton justifies the right’s most negative caricature of liberals and feminists: She pretends to oppose corporate power while profiting from her business connections, and blames her troubles on misogyny, a shadowy male fear of smart women. But sometimes people dislike smart women, and smart men too, because they’re just not likable — they’re arrogant and emotionally undeveloped, all head and no heart.

To their detractors, both Clintons seem like a mandarin class of professional meddlers who’ve never had to balance a checkbook, meet a payroll or soothe a colicky baby. At best they float above the rest of us in a protective bubble of righteousness and self-delusion. At worst, they’re parasites, fat ticks living off the people whose hard work they have no experience of, or respect for. But clearly Hillary gets it worse than her husband, because as Peter Kramer points out, her brains, ambition and emotional obtuseness just mean she’d make a fine man — and nobody likes that in a woman. She suffers the curse and blessing of modern womanhood: She’s expected to be a whole person — independent, empathic, sexual, spiritual, engaged in the world, attuned within — something that is still not required of men.

I wonder if maybe it’s progress, though, that now, in what Sheehy infelicitously calls her Flaming Fifties, Hillary has finally been judged sexy, as in Tom Junod’s infamous October Esquire piece. Maybe her decision to finally move out from her husband’s shadow has made her more vital and alluring (it’s no secret that women get sexier as they get more comfortable with themselves, and their power.)

At 52, Hillary has made her latest choice — to go for the political career she was too timid and confused to pursue at 27. Maybe she’ll surprise us, even seduce us, with integrity and innovation, as she finally cobbles together what she’ll do as the politician, not as the wife.