Wholehearted Endorsement

For reasons unknown, I keep doing these election endorsements. I mean, it's not as if one of my six readers is going to vote one way or another on my say-so. But what the hell. 

In 2004, I gave a lukewarm Kerry endorsement: more of a mutter-out than a shout-out. 

[English major aside--that word lukewarm is one of those neat little redundancies that abound in our kleptomaniac language: luke derives from OE lew and means "warm", so lukewarm is "warmwarm". Other examples include pizza pie ("pie pie"), Mt. Fuji ("Mount mountain"),  the hoi polloi ("the the commoners"), and my favourite, The La Brea Tar Pits ("the the tar tar pits").]

This year things are a wee bit different in that I can't be redundant enough in my enthusiastic cheerleading for Senator John McCa--

ZOT!!

Sorry, damn voting machine flipped. Here, let me recalibrate:

...in my enthusiastic cheerleading for Senator Barack McCain and the entire Republican ticket.

Hmmm.

See, this is kind of unnerving. How is it they can make hackproof, foolproof ATMs but can't seem to manufacture a voting machine you can trust?

If perchance this election turns out a little different than the polls predict it will--say, for example, that McCain wins, which is currently flat-out incompossible if you believe any poll at all--Republicans will look us all in the face and marvel at the Bradley effect.  Privately, they'll wink and chuckle and say hey, look, Sarah, we stole another one. 

Don't think they're not trying. They're trying hard. Tactics range from the old tried and true "Barack Osama"--printed right on the ballot!--to, essentially, outright rejecting Democrat voters. Rumours are swirling around various ghettos that anyone in any trouble with the law will be arrested when they show up to vote. The unspoken assumption, of course, is that most of these  people "in trouble with the law" are poor blacks who are likely to vote for Obama. 

Pull these tricks in carefully targeted battleground states and they could well plant McCain's wrinked ass in the White House. 

I think John McCain would have made an excellent President twenty years ago. In his dotage he's become querulous, prone to mental gaffes and little explosions of temper that are surely not what the world needs right now.

al-Qaeda endorses McCain: I rest my case.

 Besides, at his advanced age, Sarah Palin assumes more of a critical role...and that woman utterly terrifies me.

I tried to give Palin the benefit of every doubt I could. There is often something to be said for the ordinary (wo)man's perspective, and political naivete can be refreshing and results-oriented: no B.S. here, thanks. An open mind on an outsider can make for some very good decisions.

But Sarah Palin is ignorant.

Not just ignorant, but proudly ignorant. She doesn't know what it is that vice-presidents do; she can't tell you where she gets her information beyond stating she reads "all" the newspapers. Viciously anti-intellectual, she said in her first policy speech that fruit fly research has "nothing to do with the public good".  Scientists vociferously disagree, including the ones that used fruit flies to win the Nobel Prize for advancing the understanding of birth defects (like Down's Syndrome!) in humans. 

But hey, what do scientists know? They don't even believe in God!

And yes, her foreign policy experience comes from looking out her living room window. This is not a person I would let into the White House on a guided tour.

So, we all know who I'm against, and that I would vote Obama by default if I had a vote to cast. But what makes this election so cool is that I wouldn't vote for Obama by default. I'd vote for him without the slightest bit of reservation or hesitation, and I'd keep kicking the machine until it counted my vote for Obama six times. 

Because Obama is what America and the world needs. It sounds messianic, and maybe it even is, a bit: certainly these seem like the financial end times. His "spread the wealth" mantra, mocked by Joe the Plumber, would accompish what Reagan's "trickle down" economics never did: it would narrow the gap between rich and poor, making America more equable and equitable. (English major re-intrudes: they called it trickle-down economics. Not gush down, flow down or even leak down: they must have realized the green money trickling down would yellow and liquify.)

Obama started his campaign with soaring, almost Lincolnesque speeches that were long on hope and change and short on policy. As the campaign progressed, he became increasingly grounded. He's refrained, by and large, from the kind of freakishly negative attacks that are all too common in politics nowadays, hearkening back to when policy mattered. 

Critics are quick to point to Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers and say there are murky depths to Obama. Unlikely, says I: a man as cerebral as Barack Obama is surely capable of his own thoughts. Wright's black liberation theology, stripped of its radicalism, is actually a noble goal, no different from women's or gay rights; and as for Ayers, Obama's had limited contact with the former Weatherman and he does not in any way support actions committed some forty years ago. 

No--Obama represents nothing more or less than a centering of America. As such, the right has little choice but to brand him a socialist, a communist, a terror in waiting, much the same way our Canadian Liberals tried to paint swastikas on Stephen Harper.

I mean "centering" in a couple of different senses. Not only does Obama mean to reclaim government from the clutches of the far right, he also means to refocus America on its constitutional ideals, to restore the kind of levelheadedness that once marked American policy both domestic and foreign.

The thing that most impresses those who meet Barack Obama is his own personal centeredness. You can't rattle him: he smiles when attacked and calmly refutes. This is not something we're used to seeing from mere humans, much less politicians. But it's something we can and should aspire to. 

Most promisingly, Obama encourages people to think for themselves.  His Constitutional Law exam (pdf) advised students "You do not need to arrive at a definitive conclusion...Instead, make the strongest possible argument for each claim."

To me, that illustrates that Obama doesn't think, you should pardon the pun, in black and white. Contrast that with Bush's famous maxim "You're either with us or ag'in' us". As polarized as America has become under Bush, it could well reunify under Obama. 

Will Obama save the world? Of course not. The expectations being piled on this one man are immense and impossible to live up to. But Barack Obama means to try. He has "the audacity of hope". And as audacious as hope may be at a time like this, it's certainly preferable to any alternative. I think so. Colin Powell thinks so. If John McCain wasn't running against Barack, I bet he'd think so too.

The choice could not be more clear: vote--every vote counts, especially since there are those out there who want to make sure some don't--and vote Obama for President.