Wag the War

摘要

It's Only A Slight Kxaggkration to say that this fall's election season is all about the hopes and the fears of Elizabeth Godincz, who is taking a lunch-time break on a shaded bench near a Florentine fountain in The Village shopping arcade of Houston. She is 26, a graduate of the university in her hometown of El Paso, the daughter of an Air Force sergeant major. She is not allied with either political party. She respects the military, loves business and likes her job selling prepaid legal-service policies out of the binder she carries. She likes George W. Bush, and yet doesn't like the idea of going to war with Iraq, and her biggest concern is to make her way in the boomless commercial landscape of Houston. "The people I hang out with are pretty worried," said Godincz. "Going to war is no fun. I worry about the economy. And I don't think it is right to attack an entire country for the acts of a few." Feed the trends in political demography into a computer and you'll find Godinez in the spot where the lines intersect. She is the kind of late-deciding Latina both parties covet in, say, the surprisingly competitive Senate race in Texas, to which the president traveled last week to decry Saddam Hussein and tout the virtues of the Republican candidate in a downtown Houston ballroom across the street from what used to be Enron.