Come on - this should have been a no-brainer. But I plan on bringing a book with me to the polling place tomorrow, and I'll wait all day if I have to to vote for Obama.
I do highly recommend the really excellent post from Andrew Sullivan over at The Atlantic about why he endorsed Obama. I forwarded parts of it to my mother, an undecided voter (?!?!) in Michigan, after she and I talked about the election for about 90 minutes the other night. A little taste from Sullivan:
We need to win the argument in the developing world; we need to reach out and persuade the Muslim middle - especially the next generation in Iran and Iraq and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Turkey and Western Europe - about the virtues of democracy and constitutionalism. We cannot do that if we trash our own values ourselves. It is self-defeating. We cannot be a beacon to the world until we have reformed ourselves. In this war, we are also fighting for an America that does not lose its soul in fighting our enemy. Just because we are fighting evil does not mean we cannot ourselves succumb to it. That is what my Christian faith teaches me - that no nation has a monopoly on virtue, and that every generation has to earn its own integrity. I fear and believe we have given away far too much - and that, while this loss is permanent, it can nonetheless be mitigated by a new start, a new direction, a new statement that the America the world once knew and loved is back.It will not be easy. The world will soon remember why it resents America as well as loves it. But until this unlikely fellow with the funny ears and strange name and exotic biography emerged on the scene, I had begun to wonder if it was possible at all. I had almost given up hope, and he helped restore it. That is what is stirring out there; and although you are welcome to mock me for it, I remain unashamed. As someone once said, in the unlikely story of America, there is never anything false about hope. Obama, moreover, seems to bring out the best in people, and the calmest, and the sanest. He seems to me to have a blend of Midwestern good sense, an intuitive understanding of the developing world that is as much our future now as theirs', an analyst's mind and a poet's tongue. He is human. He is flawed. He will make mistakes. His passivity and ambiguity are sometimes weaknesses as well as strengths.
But there is something about his rise that is also supremely American, a reminder of why so many of us love this country so passionately and are filled with such grief at what has been done to it and in its name. I endorse Barack Obama because I will not give up on America, because I believe in America, and in her constitution and decency and character and strength.
