The way politics works in this country, it is the person who can look good and who can stir up a crowd that wins elections. More often than not, the candidate with the dramatic punch is the one who wins, not the one who is smartest or most experienced. Whether the candidate is for the people or for corporate profits, it's the one who can pull off the smashing one-liners and sound bites. I know. I'm a Californian and I've seen the Hollywood movie star swagger in and swoop up the governorship more than once.

In America, politics is all about the marketing of a candidate.

That said, Obama has all of the above. He has a way of exciting a very broad cross-section of people. I think this country is starved for someone who can make them feel good about being Americans and I think Obama is in the right place at the right time to do that.

If it were between Al Gore and Obama I'd prefer Gore, but Obama probably has the star power to go further, even though Gore has more qualifications.

We could do a lot worse. We already have. I could be very happy in a country with Obama as President.

It's the little things.

LW says he has to choose between living a domestic life or doing something heroic, but I don't see that he has to choose. Like one poster said, one can romanticize heroism, but we have opportunities to make a difference and often a big difference all the time. We run across people in trouble, people having difficulties and we can take action at any time and transform peoples' lives. Life is full of opportunities to do this, even while being in a relationship and having a family.

What a great example he could offer to a child he brought into this world; to make the most of opportunities to help others.

The main question he has to ask is: is he attracted to the glamor of heroism or to affecting a transformation, however quietly that may come to pass?

There are lots of interesting points of view expressed here, all over the map, but the critical point for me has to do with control or the lack of it. Alcohol problems have to do with chemical dependency. If you can't just stop in order to shave off a few calories and if you are ashamed enough about what you're doing that you hide it, you are hooked. Like anything that hooks us, and it can be food, love, whatever...we get hooked because of chemical responses that go on in our brains.

Studies have shown that the predisposition to respond in a certain way chemically to alcohol can be inherited which is why the alcoholic father is a red flag. There's nothing shameful about having a certain biochemical make-up that causes you to react in a certain way to alcohol. And Cary's point about the continuum is well put. There are varying degrees of being hooked. I have known people who have gone through recovery who never appeared to have a problem. They appeared quite functional, but they knew something was wrong and sought help. I think you know that something is very wrong about the way you drink and perhaps this letter is a first step in taking some action to get help.

The thing is, you absolutely need support when you are making the kind of change that is wrenching you away from something that a part of you really wants to keep doing. That's why AA is a good suggestion. But really, any of the suggestions mentioned here; therapy, other types of recovery groups would work. As far as telling your husband, when the time is right you will. The most important thing is to make contact with something that can serve as a support system.

I hope you will continue this journey. It can be tremendously healing on many levels as often there are many other things about one's life that are part of the struggle. Many positive changes could result from this. You are at a turning point.

I've currently got a phone with a lot of features. If you look at the bullet list of things it can do, it's truly impressive.

And yet, accessing those features is such a pain that many of them might as well not be there at all.

What Apple understands well, and which is often spun as just an element of marketing, is that if a product is intuitive to use, it'll be enjoyable to use - rather than frustrating to use. Which means it can - and will - be used.

What IS marketing hype is to feature a bunch of difficult to master and poorly integrated capabilities and tout such a device as if it were useful. And that's what "smart phone" and PDA companies have done for years.

Making a product that breaks ground, not necessarily in terms of feature set, but in terms of ease of use is not marketing - that's good engineering. This isn't to say that Steve Jobs doesn't give a great presentation... but it helps when he has something truly elegant to demo.

I've developed software for 23 years now. I started out thinking that the first Mac was an attractive toy. After many years on the front lines of consumer software development, seeing the substantive difference between products filled with features that couldn't be accessed by most people, and those rare products that were designed to do whatever they do easily and intuitively, my admiration for what Apple did with the Mac, the iPod and now the iPhone has deepened significantly.

They truly have, repeatedly, redefined product categories.