Four Reasons To Elect Barack Obama

I'd like to share with you why I believe our nation desperately needs Barack Obama in the White House as President of the United States of America, and why I give him my full support to that end.

First, let me tell you a little about myself: I am a male, 36-year old, middle-upper class Democrat. I have a wife and young child, I am a U.S. government employee, and I live near San Jose, California. While I have voted in most general elections during my adult life, the national political scene has always felt relatively boring and unimportant to me.

But my apathy has changed after eight years of utterly disastrous domestic and foreign policies from the Bush administration that have failed us as a people, and weakened our nation economically, politically and morally.

After eight years of a long list of shockingly idiotic, disgusting, inflammatory, and in some cases flatly illegal policies, national politics has never seemed so important and compelling to me as it does now. And never have I felt so patriotic as I do now, after watching the steady destruction of our national character, our natural, fiscal and human resources, and our reputation around the world. I guess the freedoms and national pride that I always took for granted, I see now being thoroughly eroded and ground away by our nation’s behavior, and I am starting to genuinely fear for our future if we don’t make an immediate and substantial course correction.
So despite my historical apathy for political matters, I have been watching the 2008 primary campaign with a strong and daily fervor, reading the news, reading the candidates’ positions, watching the debates, and making my judgments about who can lead us back to the heritage, reputation and strength that we Americans have fought for, died for, and deserve to enjoy and pass on to our children. This election is so important that I’ve even done something I’ve never done before …contributed my own hard-earned money to two political campaigns, first Joe Biden’s, and now Barack Obama’s, which is a big deal for me.

But you see, after choking for eight years on Bush’s stench of fear, war, incompetence and swagger, Barack Obama is that desperately needed “fresh air” of American optimism, integrity, accountability, constructive engagement, unity, pragmatism, and healing that this nation – and by extension the world – so desperately needs.

I would like to point out four aspects of Barack Obama’s candidacy in particular that move me to fully support his candidacy: his ability to inspire, his ability to unite people of different minds around a common purpose, his political pragmatism, and his consistency in who he is and what he stands for.

In the next few posts, I'm going to address these four reasons in detail.