To those who want to be my President:

I just sent this e-mail to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, John McCain and Mike Huckabee. I'll keep y'all posted on the responses...

To those who want to be my President:

I'm officially undecided, so I planned to spend this evening going over each of your Web sites to determine which of you was closest to my own point of view. But I was interrupted.

A woman knocked on my door. She's in her 50s, pregnant by her estranged husband, who lives in the apartment building across the street from my house. He's unemployed, his only income what he makes from selling drugs. Janice had driven over out of desperation to get money to pay her electric bill and buy groceries. The man slapped her and told her that the $15 he'd given her earlier in the week was all she could expect from him.

She called the police to report the assault, his non-support and his drug activity. When Janice knocked on my door, it had been more than an hour since she called. I offered to call for her, and she told me I was better off not getting involved.

She finally left, not sure she'd have enough gas in her car to get home. I called the police; an hour later, still no one has come. (For those keeping track, that's two hours from the time the initial assault was reported.)

I've read each of your plans for America. They're all well and good. But I want to know what you would do to help Janice, and to help me, a tax-paying homeowner living across from what the Winston-Salem Police Department well knows is a hive of drug activity. I want to know what you, as President, would do to fix a situation where:

- A convicted felon with no legal income refuses to support the mother of his children,
- A woman reporting a physical assault is ignored by the local police,
- A homeowner reporting a neighborhood domestic dispute is also ignored,
- Citizens don't report crimes because they know that no one will come to help them, and
- Incidents in some neighborhoods are taken more seriously than in others.

This is the kind of thing that my neighbors and I face on a daily basis. I've always been a firm believer in individual responsibility, and that government, especially Federal government, exists only to do what individuals cannot. But what happens when individuals do everything right, and their government still comes up short?

What do you say to women relying on the protection of the law, when that protection isn't there? What do you say to law-abiding homeowners with the misfortune of living on a street written off by law enforcement?

Your positions on the grand issues of the day matter, yes. But I'm a lot more interested in your answers to these small questions.

Thank you for your time.