This November, our nation will be making a historic choice. Our choice will boil down to either the first black President of the United State or the most liberal Republican since Abraham Lincoln. Either way, history will be made and we are glad to be a part of it.
After months of watching primaries, debates, and all the issues related to this election, we have made up our minds and have decided to vote for Obama. Our reason is simple: it is this “vision” thing. We feel now more than ever we need a leader with vision. Watching Barack Obama at the Democratic Convention in Boston in 2004, and remembering how back then, a prospective Senator gave a speech to the convention that set the place on fire, we saw a man who seemed in tune with a fear that America might be losing its way, and who had the charisma and the intelligence to steer a new course. What he delivered in 2004 wasn't just a speech, it was a clarion call, and it made people feel America could be dignified again. Being instinctively connected to the hopes of a generation by far overshadows the experience he lacks.
Obama loves his country, but he knows ordinary people don't feel proud, they don't feel spoken to, they don't feel included, and Obama knows how to make people feel that change is an essential part of growth. He is a young-yet-old kind of Democrat for a new kind of age, which is why people talk of Kennedy when they hear him. He can inspire people to consider not only their rights but also their responsibilities, and that might be a message Obama can take to the world. Obama is not a scion of soured radicalism and not a graduate of the 1980s political resentments either, but a modern candidate who knows what life is like in America for both the working and the middle classes, and he wants to bring them forward and open them to change.
Our global interdependence is bigger and the times demand the kind of change he seems to embody. But, more than anything, Obama has that one thing that national political experience often deflates: a sense of basic realities and of what is needed to alter them. “The underlying struggle,” he writes in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, is “between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, whilst still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty towards those not like us.”
The person who wrote those sentences may be on the road to running a great deal of your life after today. We believe John McCain simply couldn't write nor enunciate those words, and we can't think of even a current British politician who could write them either. Today's events are not just a matter for America and Americans, but for all of us around the globe, and we hope they inspire at least a season or two of thoughtfulness after what has seemed an age of spite.
Obama still shows his roots-- a faith in ordinary citizens, Touting the virtues of Obama must go hand in hand with exposing the childish hypocrisy of Republicans, so many of whom have been complicit in the disasters of the past eight years. But we should address this in a light-hearted way.
Hmmmmm...Let’s see now. Let’s see if we have this straight.....
If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different." Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers- a quintessential American story.
If your name is Barack, you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
Name your kids Willow, Bristol, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.
Graduate from Harvard Law School and you are unstable. Attend 6 different small colleges before graduating, you're well-rounded.
If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
If your total resume is local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.
If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian and entitled to be President.
If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, and how to protect yourself from sexual predators, you are eroding the fiber of society.
If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.
If your wife is a Harvard educated lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America's.
If you're husband is nicknamed "First Dude," with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.
OK, much clearer now!
It is our sincere opinion that, in today’s world and given the demonstrated importance of global economic interdependence, as well as the limitations of military power, the office of the U.S. President is grossly overrated. We all know what will happen after the inauguration on January 20, 2009: as soon as the new President walks into the Oval Office: he will probably find on his desk a folder giving him his real marching orders – much of which will have very little to do with the wishes and expectations of The People who elected him.
We have no control over that reality. Besides, in today’s world, the presidency is more and more a symbol of the democratic process than just raw power. And there’s no denying that the American people consider their relationship with the President as a very special one. Therefore, what counts for us is our civic duty to vote in November. Whether we feel we are voting for the best candidate or the least bad candidate, vote we must.
Senator Obama is our choice. You decide who is yours.
a quest for common ground and a pragmatic inclination toward defining issues in winnable ways. As Rev. Alvin Love recently said, "I think at his heart Barack is a community organizer. I think what he's doing now is that. It's just a larger community to be organized." Forty-seven years ago, Dwight D. Eisenhower, that soldier statesman par excellence, bid farewell to a nation he had served for more than five decades. In his televised address, Ike offered advice that still rings true today.
“As we peer into society’s future, we must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”
Today we are engaged in a debate about these very issues. Deep in America’s heart, we believe, is the nagging fear that our best years as a nation may be over. We are disliked overseas and feel insecure at home. We watch as our federal budget hemorrhages red ink and our civil liberties are eroded. Crises in energy, health care and education threaten our way of life and our ability to compete internationally. There are also the issues of a costly, unpopular war; a long-neglected infrastructure; and an aging and increasingly needy population. We are not alone in worrying that our generation will fail to do what those before us did so well: leave America a better, stronger place than the one it found. Given the magnitude of these issues and the cost of addressing them, our next president must be able to bring about a sense of national unity and change. We are convinced that Barack Obama is the one presidential candidate today who can encourage ordinary Americans to stand straight again; he is a man who can solve our national wounds and both inspire and pursue genuine bipartisan cooperation. Just as important, Obama can assure the world and Americans that this great nation’s impulses are still free, open, fair and broad-minded. Uncommon political courage will be required.
Yet this courage can be summoned only if something profoundly different transpires. Putting America first — ahead of our own selfish interests — must be our national priority if we are to retain our capacity to lead. Given Obama’s support among young people, we believe that he will be most invested in defending the interests of these rising generations and, therefore, the long-term interests of this nation as a whole. Without his leadership, our children and grandchildren are at risk of growing older in a marginalized country that is left to its anger and divisions. Such an outcome would be an unacceptable legacy for any great nation.
If we felt that John McCain could, just for a moment, put aside his outdated, military rhetoric (he thinks we have “won” in Iraq) and stop mimicking George Bush’s shameful exploitation of 9/11 (he talks about setting up a “9/11 Commission” to address the nation’s problems), then we might pause to take him seriously. But with McCain now having to rely, sadly, on a third rate Governor from Alaska (and her lipstick) to add luster to his campaign, he should prepare himself for a landslide defeat in November, because the people have seen (or will soon see) the shallowness of a man with no vision (brave as he is). McCain’s strategy is mindlessly simple: just hang in there for another few weeks, avoid and evade specifics, give the overwhelmed, over-worked, underpaid American electorate the same bull feathers of a thoroughly defunct, discredited, war mongering Republican Party, parade on stage a sexy VP candidate to give your own presence a fresh look, pretend that it’s OK not to know how to send an email, keep reminding people about 9/11, … the insulting list goes on.
