I'm not a pundit, talking head or political apparatchik. I'm just a fairly well informed, even-headed, politically active guy from Indianapolis. Rather than say I endorse Barack Obama for President and think that that may influence anyone to go vote for Obama. I will provide some links. Enjoy. Oh and please, please, please VOTE!!
Peggy Noonan's WSJ Editorial: Obama and the Runaway Train
Tim O'Reilly of the O'Reilly Radar very thoughtful endorsement: Why I Support Barack Obama
Oh and what this guy says
The Final Indignity: Dick Cheney's hometown paper, the reliably Republican daily in Casper, Wyoming, the Star-Tribune, endorsed Obama this morning. Like so many others that backed Bush in 2004 the editorial cited as a key factor, the horrendous pick of Palin.
The Annenberg School's Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Brown University's Glenn Loury on the final days of a historic election cycle on Bill Moyer's Journal: Watch this thoughtful, critical, intelligent, summation of this election cycle.
"KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON This has been a disappointing election year in which there were major problems facing the electorate, a campaign process that didn't address them, debates that didn't do as much as they could to inform people about the tough challenges, the tradeoffs, and the likely solutions. Candidates who didn't tell us the full truth about everything that we know that they stood for in the past and would stand for in the future but which nonetheless put forward I think two qualified individuals to be president of the United States."
"Glenn Loury And I'm thinking, you know, some of this stuff, maybe it won't sell in middle America. But there's nothing wrong with it as such. There's nothing that should be disqualifying about it. It should have a place at the table of American conversation. And my fear was that as Obama, of necessity, needed to sort of marginalize that kind of thing, which had been important in his own life coming along. But now to move on, he needed to marginalize it, that the result would be that it would end up being marginalized across the board. It would end up a kind of commonplace assumption that that kind of talk is un-American or mildly offensive or whacko or something like that. And I just don't think that's so."
Back in late September, Bill Moyers also interviewed Andrew J. Bacevich — Professor of International Relations at Boston University, retired Army colonel, and West Point graduate who encouraged viewers to take a step back and connect the intellectual and philosophical dots between U.S. foreign policy, consumerism, politics, and militarism. It's a fascinating discussion.
"Andrew J. Bacevich I've been troubled by the course of U.S. foreign policy for a long, long time. And I wrote the book in order to sort out my own thinking about where our basic problems lay. And I really reached the conclusion that our biggest problems are within.
I think there's a tendency in the part of policy makers — and probably a tendency in the part of many Americans — to think that the problems we face are problems that are out there somewhere beyond our borders, and that if we can fix those problems, then we'll be able to continue the American way of life as it has long existed. I think it's fundamentally wrong. Our major problems are here at home."
Some final thoughts:
One of the things that I think has happened in this election is that the symbol of Barack Obama has been taken by the world community as a symbol of change. And that's not simply a change in a reconciliation with a troubled part of the United States' past but also change from the Bush administration, change from a world in which anchoring in the international community was frowned upon. Here's a candidate whose biography is anchored in the international community. Time in Indonesia, father from Kenya.
I think the symbolic importance of an Obama candidacy to the world community at a time in which our relations have with other parts of the world are somewhat troubled is, in fact, one of the important symbolic elements of this campaign.
I also think one of the things that we (I) know about Senator McCain is that in important ways he isn't President George W. Bush. And he hasn't been able in the campaign to talk about those things. Because to the extent that he does, he alienates part of the base that he needs to be elected. And he didn't tell us things about his own biography.
Speaking to this impulse to use government to protect people, virtually no one knows that he championed the Patient's Bill of Rights, something that runs counter to virtually everything a real conservative would want to see government do.
It's a failure to be able to find a way to deliver a message that would let his base still support him and yet speak to the rest of the folks about what his actual record was. And I wonder if he hadn't stressed all those things, if his electoral equation right now wouldn't be a lot more positive. And then there is Palin.
The World badly needed a Pres. McCain in 2000. I would have voted for him over Al Gore. At this time, after these last eight years, America and the World needs Barack Obama. We still badly need John McCain, the old, original flavor, pre-2008 version of him, in the US Senate, now more than ever.
Thought provoking post. I promise to vote.
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