MAID doesn’t detour often into electoral politics, but I thought I’d detour, on this Friday preceding Super Tuesday, to offer my personal endorsement of Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination.
I could offer up a bushel of reasons to prefer Obama over Hillary, but most of them would be a mask for the fact that I viscerally like the guy more than I like Clinton. I’ll just make two brief arguments, then, to try to convince the unconvinced. The first is that he’s more likely than Clinton to get us out of Iraq. As Chris Hayes writes in The Nation, in his pretty compelling endorsement of Obama:
The war is the most obvious and powerful distinction between the two: Hillary Clinton voted for and supported the most disastrous American foreign policy decision since Vietnam, and Barack Obama (at a time when it was deeply courageous to do so) spoke out against it. In this campaign, their proposals are relatively similar, but in rhetoric and posture Clinton has played hawk to Obama’s dove, attacking from the right on everything from the use of first-strike nuclear weapons to negotiating with Iran’s president. Her hawkishness relative to Obama’s is mirrored in her circle of advisers. As my colleague Ari Berman has reported in these pages, it’s a circle dominated by people who believed and believe that waging pre-emptive war on Iraq was the right thing to do. Obama’s circle is made up overwhelmingly of people who thought the Iraq War was a mistake.
My second argument is that it’s okay, when faced with a choice between two compelling, talented, intelligent, principled, experienced Democratic politicians who promise roughly the same menu of policies, to be nudged over the edge by Obama’s arguments about the transformative potential of hope, inspiration, and charismatic leadership. (I also think that it’s okay to be nudged over the edge by her woman-ness, or his blackness; I just happen to be a sucker for hope.)
We can’t know, unless and until he’s tested in office, that Obama has the political skills and courage to help bring real progressive change to America. Odds are, he won’t. But he makes a good case that he’s the only one who might, and his record is such that even if he’s elected and doesn’t emerge as a great leader, there’s good reason to believe that his administration would be as competent, as principled, and as effective as hers. So I’m pretty happy to vote for that, plus a helping of hope.
