One candidate must defer to other

To the editor:Our nation must be taken away from the coterie of vaqueros who have been running it since 2001.

Senators Clinton and Obama cannot be president at the same time. Therefore, one must defer to the other for the 2008 campaign. I would give the nod to Hillary Clinton for the following reasons:

1. Clinton has been on the national scene longer than Barack Obama. Whatever one's opinion of the quality of seasoning this has imparted to her, it is still a plus vis-a-vis Obama's experience.

2. At the end of the expected eight-year Clinton administration, Obama will still be young enough to weather his own eight-year hitch. The reverse would probably not be true.

3. While it is high time for African Americans to be given the opportunity to serve in our most powerful and prestigious office, it is even higher than high time for a woman to be so honored. Women, after all, are a majority. All things being equal, I favor Clinton in the top spot, although Obama's election would still be pleasing.

4. Every time I hear the gentle folk of rightist talk radio fling their Elizabethan epithets at Clinton, it hardens my resolve to see her into the office.

Her administration will be made or unmade not by her, but by the administrators and advisers with whom she surrounds herself. If people were building their hopes for President Bush's administration upon his past business experience, truly they were building on sand. Bush ran some things -- into the ground, by all accounts.

DONN S. MILLER, Tamms, Ill.