In the fall of 1964, my father pushed back from the dining room table and announced that he was taking my sister and me to Washington, D.C.

Stunning news. We did not take vacations. Dad worked at the power plant, and Mom worked at stretching his paycheck for a family of six stuffed into a two-bedroom rental house in small-town Ohio. Our big trip was the annual fall drive into Pennsylvania "to watch the leaves change."

My father never had visited our nation's capital, but it was time for him to go. He was 28 and searching for the hope he'd lost after the president, his president, had been killed in Dallas. I was 8 and wondered what I was going to do without my mother, who was staying home with my two youngest siblings.

"You go with Daddy," she said. "Go learn about America."

Dad was usually a quiet and gruff kind of guy, but he turned into a different man during our three days in Washington. At stop after stop, he regaled us with the lessons of history as he snapped our photos in front of the White House, the Washington Monument and memorials for Lincoln and Jefferson.

He mentioned a place called college, too, and said one day my sister and I would go there.

Who knew, he said. Maybe we'd even live in Washington someday.

My father was a factory worker using precious vacation days to teach his daughters about the promise of America. At every stop, he'd rock on his heels with his hands in his pockets, jingling loose change as he took in the view.

"How 'bout that," he said over and over.

Lately, I've thought a lot about that trip with my father. For all his faith in this country, he never thought he'd see the day when an African-American and a woman would be his party's front-runners in the race for president.

I don't know whom he would have supported, but I can imagine his sense of wonder at it all. How I wish that were the prevailing mood these days.

There's a lot of pontificating and hand-wringing lately over what will be left of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton by the time one of them prevails as the Democratic nominee.

I join those who urge the candidates to navigate the high road, and I hope they hand out road maps for the rest of us, too. Too many of us are losing our way.

Enthusiasm is morphing into zealotry. Passion is devolving into vitriol. Friends are turning on friends. Family members are barely speaking. True believers are turning into all-or-nothing demagogues.

I have heard too many say that if Clinton loses, it will mean America hates all its women. I've lost count of those claiming that if Obama loses, African-American voters will boycott the general election.

How is it, in 2008, that two wildly diverse groups of Americans can be depicted as so monolithic and mindless, as if their roles in democracy were determined solely by their DNA? It is one thing to advocate for a candidate. It is something altogether different to traffic in the very stereotypes these candidacies are meant to dispel.

Fortunately, contradictions keep popping up. Missouri's Sen. Claire McCaskill has endorsed Obama; Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones is stumping for Clinton. Actress Kathleen Turner declared for Obama; writer Maya Angelou supports Clinton. Last week, African-American students held a giant Clinton sign at a busy intersection in the same Ohio neighborhood where white college kids canvassed for Obama.

Don't they know their place? Don't they know what they're supposed to believe?

All these years later, I still cling to my father's version of America. He took his working-class daughters to the front gate of the White House and said, "That's your house, too." He never stopped believing that.

When Cleveland hosted the recent debate between Clinton and Obama, I sat in the audience and wished Dad were alive to see it.

I could imagine him leaning back in his seat, shaking his head as he took it all in.

"How 'bout that," he would have said.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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