During the primaries, I wrote up some thoughts on why I support Barack Obama for President. As it turns out, I’ve ended up getting pretty involved this year. I think it’s pretty clear where I stand on the matter… So, I thought a bit about whether I’d be writing anything along the lines of an endorsement.
There is after all the 3:1 lead in editorial endorsements (in visual format), which includes some surprises like the Anchorage Daily News (Alaska’s #1 paper) or the Chicago Tribune (the paper’s first Democratic presidential endorsement in its 161-year history).
And there are the bevy of high profile Republican and conservative endorsements, from Colin Powell (his rebuke of how Islam has been used as a smear in this campaign is particularly powerful), Christopher Buckley, Charles Fried, CC Goldwater, and many others.
My pick of the most insightful and interesting endorsement is Professor Cass Sunstein’s (Wikipedia). As a long-time mentor and friend, Sunstein’s endorsement gives I think the deepest peek into Obama’s history and growth.
Ultimately though, I think that Obama’s strongest endorsement is in his own words.
Now, I’m not talking about the speeches, or the debates (for those who missed them, I think the final debate was the most spirited and “best” debate for both sides), but rather about the extended, relatively unscripted Q&As and interviews that Obama’s given.
In my prior writing, I mentioned that it was when I first saw a Q&A that Obama gave at Google last year that I began to take him seriously as a candidate. As I have been exposed to more of these extemporaneous discussions (both new and historical), I have only become more impressed with his mental dexterity, his skills in communication and clear thought, his ability to think both broadly and deeply, and above all, his ability to connect disparate threads within a larger frame. These qualities are in short supply in any context, much less in Presidential candidates, and when coupled with the other personal qualities he’s shown… well, I’ve already said that I’m a fan.
But, you don’t have to take my word for it. I quite enjoyed reading the full transcript of a recent Obama interview conducted by Joe Klein for Time Magazine (unfortunately, they’re server recently crashed, so they appear to have lost the discussion thread that followed and express some quite worthwhile thoughts along the lines of my previous paragraph), and I would recommend for anyone to take a few minutes and read through it. (Also, I’d encourage comparing that to the final article and seeing how they match up. As an aside to that aside, I’m fully supportive of reporters/publications publishing more notes and full transcripts of interviews and hope that this becomes de rigueur).
The entire conversation flows quite naturally, but if I had to cherry-pick one part to quote, it’d be this:
The biggest problem with our energy policy has been to lurch from crisis to trance. And what we need is a sustained, serious effort. Now, I actually think the biggest opportunity right now is not just gas prices at the pump but the fact that the engine for economic growth for the last 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20, and that was consumer spending. I mean, basically, we turbo-charged this economy based on cheap credit. Whatever else we think is going to happen over the next certainly 5 years, one thing we know, the days of easy credit are going to be over because there is just too much de-leveraging taking place, too much debt both at the government level, corporate level and consumer level. And what that means is that just from a purely economic perspective, finding the new driver of our economy is going to be critical. There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy.
I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.
Not only does this illustrate Obama’s understanding of the interconnections between our energy policy, financial crisis, our petro-industrial-agricultural system, and healthcare, but also that despite his schedule, where his priorities are. Heck, I haven’t read Pollan’s latest piece yet (granted, it isn’t addressed to me :), and I know that Obama’s schedule has been much busier than mine. This of course compares quite favorably with the multitude of reports of Bush’s unwillingness (inability?) to read even the most abbreviated of one-pagers.
Well, I don’t have a very strong closing here – this is more of a late night ramble (written straight through, no less) than any sort of coherent piece, and I’ve been spending the past few months slinging code rather than words. I’ll see you guys in a week. Good luck, and vote well.
