Gobama!

In case you haven't figured it out, I'm sure this will be a huge surprise, I am supporting Barack Obama for President. He appears to be the real thing to me. Bill Richardson was my first choice early on but he bit the dust rather quickly and I began to watch Barack Obama. His considerable ability to "organize" has been evident in his fund-raising, his ability to turn out huge crowds, his ability to attract smart people to his campaign and/or for endorsements, his ability to find local leadership in neighborhood after neighborhood, community after community, city after city, state after state. Maybe that'll teach the Repubs not to mock and belittle community organizers!

A long list of prominent Republicans have now endorsed Senator Obama including GWB's former press secretary, Scott McClellan, Former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, Ronald Reagan's Chief of Staff, Duberstein, several Republican Governors, William Weld for example, and even the occasional right wing radio talk show host, Michael Smirkonish for one example. It's pretty heady stuff.

The next President will be faced with daunting problems: a melt down in the world's financial sector, a health care system which is critically ill, an economy teetering on the brink of a deep recession, deficits as far as the eye can see, a national debt that is impossible to express in terms that mere humans can understand, and two intractable wars.

One good thing I see is the dissolution of the social conservatives right wing base which progressively hijacked the Republican party over the last 8 years. The infighting has already begun -- McCain campaign officials calling Sarah Palin a "whack job" for example. Neither the hometown Wasila, Alaska or Anchorage newspapers endorsed Sarah Palin and John McCain. John McCain's inexplicable move to the right during the last two years cost him the respect and support of a huge number of moderate Americans if all the polls out there are to be believed.

The Republicans' cynical attempts to paint Barack Obama as a socialist, a Marxist, a "redistributionist," a friend of terrorism, a Muslim, an Arab, a foreigner, in fact, made John McCain a smaller and smaller person in light of his larger than life history. Karl Rove and his subsequent political incarnations took John McCain, a genuine American hero, and turned him into a tawdry and petty politician. The more mud McCain and Palin tried to sling, the dirtier their own hands became.

Barack Obama has attracted the best and brightest of American minds to advise and counsel him, he has remained calm and focused while John McCain careened from strategy to strategy, tactic to tactic. John McCain has attracted and elevated mediocrity to a smarmy kind of iconic status - Joe the Plumber comes to mind. The Republicans' assault on knowledge, on facts, on truth, on honor, on civility will likely cost them dearly. I sincerely hope so at any rate.

Barack Obama grew larger and larger this last several months in my mind; John McCain sank lower and grew smaller. Barack Obama reached out: John McCain reached down. Barack Obama was able to widen his circle of inclusion; John McCain directed his increasingly shrill, mudslinging message to an ever-shrinking market - the right wing base of the ideologically driven social conservatives, managing to offend 2/3 of the electorate.

So there you go. I'm nervous as hell that something catastrophic will happen and McCain will guttersnatch the election somehow and we'll continue the country's downward spiral. So like Rachael Maddow might say, somebody please talk me down!

Bud C.
Gobama!