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Endorsements 2008 Clickables president, election, vote, endorsement, barack obama, pick, voting, endorses, endorse October 10, 2008, 9:06 AM Esquire Endorses Barack Obama for President We thought this election would be a serious fight over the future of this country, but only one candidate showed up.
Barack Obama Christopher Lane/Contour by Getty Images It was a day in February and the sun was little more than a gaudy accessory. The man stood on a bridge along Eleventh Street in Milwaukee. Beneath him, along Interstate 43, the traffic ran north and south in a great rattle. The cold made everything seem fragile, as though the cars would shatter if they collided. It was ten o'clock in the morning and it was 8 degrees, and the man held his sign while the ice formed on the edges of his face, trying to get the cars below him to honk their horns in support of Barack Obama. He had been a classmate, long ago, before he'd gone into the Navy the way his family had wanted him to, a fellow student at a high school in Hawaii, where they had no mornings like this one. He had traveled the world and he had come to this bridge with the ice on his face because he was looking for something and he thought he'd found it. But he stood there, holding his sign and waving at the drivers below as the sun rose vainly higher in the sky and nobody looked up toward it to see the sign and honk their horns. "I'm working for him," the man said, "because a lot of what I believed, I don't believe anymore, and I want to again. Barack Obama had a moment, as fragile as thin ice, in which he could have defined "change," which he never truly has defined except as all those things encompassed by the phrase "Elect me." He could have defined change as a rejection of preemptive war, of torture, of black prisons, of warrantless surveillance, as a renewed embrace of our founding documents. He could have defined change as a condemnation of crony government, of incompetent government, of drowned cities, of conscious, greed-driven neglect that has turned the idea of "the general welfare" into a spiritless punch line. He could have defined change with the laws already on the books. He could have defined change simply as "change back," to an America in which so much of what the current administration has done was not merely un-American, it was unimaginable. He could have celebrated the people who never changed at all -- the heroic military lawyers of the JAG Corps, to name one conspicuous example -- and welcomed us all back to the better country they'd never left. In August, for whatever reason, he went to the Reverend Rick Warren's Saddleback Church for a "forum" in front of people who have no more intention of voting for him than they do of erecting a statue to Baal. It is instructive to remember that forty years ago, when George Romney ran for president, hardly anyone mentioned the fact that he was a Mormon. This year, his son, the former governor of Massachusetts, ran for president and couldn't go ten minutes without being asked about the "issue" of his religion. The very notion that an affluent celebrity God-botherer like Warren should be allowed to vet presidential candidates is in itself a measure of how badly things have turned. At one point, Warren asked Obama: "At what point does a baby get human rights?" The only proper answer to this question for anyone running for president is "How the hell do I know? If that's what you want from a president, vote for Thomas Aquinas." Instead, Obama summoned up some pale, faith-based flummery that convinced nobody and made him look like they had to tie him to the floor to keep him from floating to the ceiling. Warren responded by giving an interview after the forum in which he compared an evangelical voting for a pro-choice candidate to a Jewish voter supporting a Holocaust denier. "Change" is now whatever Barack Obama needs it to be at the moment. He thought it meant an end to "partisanship" without appreciating that democracies are supposed to be partisan, never more so than when a "bipartisan" consensus fits American military justice with a kangaroo suit. He thought it meant an end to "divisiveness" without appreciating the fact that there is much about this country now that ought to divide us, that it is time for a loud, impolite fight about what it means to be an American. In truth, though, Senator Obama is the only one of the two candidates who seems to believe in the idea of a political commonwealth, that there are those things -- be they the guarantees in the Bill of Rights or mountains in Alaska -- that we own together. Barack Obama stands, however inchoately and however diffidently, for the notion that a common purpose is necessary for common problems, that "government," as it is designed in our founding documents, is our collective responsibility. It is this collective responsibility that built America into a great power without peer in the history of the world. And it is this collective responsibility that has succumbed to nearly thirty years of phony rightist populism, corporate brigandage, and the wildly cheered abandonment of a common American civic purpose. It is shocking that in America an argument for salvaging the common good is regarded as a radical notion by anyone, but that is where we are. After all, as a young man with his potential, he could have headed straight to midtown Manhattan and made a fortune. Instead, he took a church job working for poor people in Chicago, and for his troubles, he and those poor people have been viciously jeered by the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin. And in that, however inchoately and however diffidently, Obama stands not only against Bushism, but against Reaganism, which gave it birth. This year it's more than enough because we are not all in that enterprise together anymore, and we have not been for some time. For seven years, for the purposes of deceitful war-making and constitutional vandalism, the president chose to preside over "the base," and the devil take the common good. For several years, before the war soured, and New Orleans drowned, and he meddled grotesquely with how a woman's family in Florida chose to allow her to die, and mocked the very institutions he was to protect, this was praised as the height of political acumen. The incompetent president and his wolfish advisors were encouraged and enabled in their various schemes and praised for their cleverness into the bargain. Anyone who questioned what was going on -- any member of what was once memorably described to writer Ron Suskind as the "reality-based community" -- was of no consequence, their voices ignored, their concerns as foreign as those of a tribesman in New Guinea. And now, with it all in ruins, it's time to move ahead, without recriminations or even without maintaining the simple clarity of the historical record? But make no mistake, in our view the senator from Illinois is the only possible choice to lead the country. Obscured by Obama's dithering is the fact that his Republican counterpart is one of the first presidential candidates in history to run as a parody of himself. John McCain has decided on a cheap and dishonorable campaign. He has embraced the tactics with which he was slandered in 2000, and he has hired the people responsible for them. In so doing, he has become something of a mockery of everything he once purported to be. He has stated that he wouldn't now vote for his own immigration bill. He has operated in violation of the very campaign-finance law that bears his name. And even though his own body bears the scars of torture, he has silenced himself on the issue of the torture sanctioned and designed by the government he seeks to lead, so as not to alienate "the base." The most underutilized trope of the campaign is the notion that John McCain is running against John McCain. One could be forgiven for thinking that the senator was leading a movement that had been exiled for decades and was now storming back to Washington to save the country from its oppressors. Of course, the truth is that it is the excesses of McCain's own party from which the country needs to be saved. That McCai...
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