Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. His column, Smart Remarks, appears weekly. You can c
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I'm sure it goes without saying whom I'm voting for.
But I suppose I should try to explain
why I'm voting for Barack Obama on Tuesday. Your average conservative probably thinks its because I'm a wealth-spreading socialist who wants the terrorists to force us all to gay marry.
Well, of course.
But there are other reasons as well, reasons not hatched in the right-wing radio nuthouse.
There is, for example, the idea of an Obama presidency as redemptive for a nation born in and then torn apart by slavery, and still prone to bouts of racism. An Obama presidency wouldn't eliminate racism overnight — and, should he prove an ineffective president, could ultimately make it worse. But it holds the tantalizing possibility that the United States could finally become a post-racist society. It's about time.
Electing Obama also would prove to the world that the United States means what it says when it talks of equality. More than that, it would provide a definitive break with the Bush years, when our country came to be seen more as bully than friend overseas. That needs to change, and under Obama, it could.
Obama is the thinking person's choice. He appears to possess a first-rate intellect, and is running against a movement, and ultimately a party, that is profoundly anti-intellectual. Republicans don't think; they "feel." You see where it's gotten us. And now, more than ever, we need a president capable of grasping, and grappling with, an increasingly complex world.
Obama was right about Iraq, and would be wary of getting us into a shooting war with Iran or Russia. Obama may, of course, be required to take some action against our adversaries. But one gets the sense John McCain can barely wait to attack Iran. Given the cost of Iraq — in both blood and treasure — that is simply a recklessness we cannot afford right now.
Democrats have always been better on the economy than Republicans. Bill Clinton left office with a surplus after eight years of prosperity; Bush leaves office amidst financial calamity and collapse. But Obama also understands there's a fundamental iniquity at the heart of our current economic crisis. While prosperity in recent years has been concentrated at the top, the vast bulk of the population realized an "improved" standard of living not through rising wages or falling costs — but through credit.
So what, now, is the answer? A waiter says to me the other day, "I make $25,000 per year. Joe the Plumber makes
ten times what I make. I am
not Joe the Plumber." Most people aren't, and Obama gets that. McCain doesn't.
Obama also recognizes that religious faith has played an important role in our history and must continue to do so. But he is not a fundamentalist, and as such, he can be more committed to freedom than a fundamentalist could ever be.
I speak not just of reproductive freedom, but the idea that all men (and women) are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.
All men — black and white, gay and straight,
all. When you have a system that gives some citizens more rights than others — that's not liberty. It's pretty much the polar opposite.
Finally, if Obama is elected it signals the beginning of a new era in American politics. The Bush years, "Mission Accomplished" in particular, may one day come to be seen as the high water mark of a conservative movement birthed in the Goldwater candidacy of 1964, which gathered steam with the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan and triumphed in the 1990s in Washington and on talk radio. But all movements falter.
And it's time for something new to take its place.
SMART REMARKS: Palin's smackdown
Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. E-mail him at gsmart@lnpnews.com, or phone 291-8817.
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