Pro Obama Opinion Piece

I’m going to vote for Barack Obama. But you probably guessed that.

A few readers have, from time to time, chastised me for my enthusiasm for Obama, so I’d like to explain.

First off, I’m not someone who believes that a vote for a third party candidate is a wasted vote. On the contrary. No national election is ever going to be decided by a single vote, so I think you should vote for the candidate you believe in. People say that’s wasting your vote, but you can just as well argue it’s the other way around. When your vote is one of a hundred million, it counts for a lot less than when it’s one of a million or two. In that sense, a vote for a third party candidate counts more, not less. But, people always say, what if everyone thought that way? Well, then we’d elect the candidate we really want, not the lesser of two evils.

So that’s how I’ve voted most of my adult life. Usually, but not always. Sometimes the choice is so stark that I have to go with the lesser of two evils, quite deliberately. So I voted for Nader in 2000, but in 2004 I felt I had to vote for Kerry. I had no illusions about Kerry, but the evil of the Bush presidency was just too great. I knew the effect of my vote would be infinitesimal, but it was at least something.

I understand that the Democrats and Republicans are in many ways two wings of one Corporate Party, and I realize full well that most of today’s Democratic politicians are basically what Republicans used to be before the Republicans swung so hard to the right. That said, I don’t buy that there’s no difference between the parties. If Gore had become president in 2000, for example, he never would have invaded Iraq. It never would have even occurred to him. The Democrats aren’t progressives (there are a few exceptions), but they are better than the Republicans on most of the issues I care about. Of course that’s faint praise indeed.

So a Democratic president is preferable to a Republican president, but that still doesn’t explain my vote. After all, as I said, my one vote won’t affect the outcome. So why vote for Obama? And why enthusiastically?

At bottom, I think it’s not so much the laundry list of Obama’s positions, it’s more a question of who Obama is and what an Obama presidency will mean for this country.

First, as to who Obama is. I think he is self-evidently a man of rare gifts, with a level of emotional intelligence and maturity that is unequaled in American public life. He is a true grown-up, in the finest sense of the word. He embodies grace. It may sound like I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, but that’s what I sense in the man. And I am obviously not alone.

Second, as to what an Obama presidency will mean for the country. Think of where we’ve come as a nation. American politics has become so cheapened, so coarsened, so brutalized and corrupted and dumbed down that I think it will take a leader with Obama’s gifts to pull us back from the brink. Think what it will mean to have a leader who appeals to what is best in us and not what is worst, who talks to us like fellow citizens of a great democracy, not like members of Jerry Springer’s studio audience, and who genuinely wants government to succeed.

There are lots of other reasons why an Obama presidency will be good for America — Obama’s standing in the eyes of the world; the transformative effect his presidency will have on American attitudes about race; Supreme Court nominations — but for me it’s really more personal. It’s the reasons I gave above. And it’s this: I want to live in a country where Barack Obama is president.