It's Enough

My oldest daughter challenged me the last time we discussed her reactions to this blog: "You spend a lot of time shooting down the McCain campaign, Mom," she said, "But I almost never see you write positive things about Obama."

She is right, of course. Truth told those who have read this blog from the beginning know that I have deeply ambivalent feelings about Obama. And not for any of the reasons given my McSamiacs or false independents, but because of my deeply leftist mistrust of anyone who claims to be avowedly anti-partisan in his approach. I fell out with Bill Clinton when he played conservative animosity toward the poor to his advantage (read: welfare reform), and when he reversed himself to pander to conservative hatred of gays and lesbians through DOMA.

Obama lost me early in the primary season when he hosted the cancerous Donnie McClurkin as his front early in N.C., and it is not lost on me and other gay and lesbian commentors that he has studiously avoided weighing in on Proposition 8 right now in California.

Make no mistake, people: Obama is in it to win it and if you happen to be one of the people thrown under the bus in the process you are supposed to understand and forgive.

Civil rights? FISA? Not so important until maybe after the election, when we may or may not have energy for a defense of the constitution. There will no no one held to account for the complete lawlessness of the Bush Administration. That cancer will lie dormant until some future President or Supreme Court is forced to confront it.

And still, Esquire makes its first endorsement in 75 years, and speaks in the voice of many of us as it does so:

In truth, though, Senator Obama is the only one of the two candidates who seems to believe in the idea of a political commonwealth, that there are those things -- be they the guarantees in the Bill of Rights or mountains in Alaska -- that we own together. Barack Obama stands, however inchoately and however diffidently, for the notion that a common purpose is necessary for common problems, that "government," as it is designed in our founding documents, is our collective responsibility. It is this collective responsibility that built America into a great power without peer in the history of the world. And it is this collective responsibility that has succumbed to nearly thirty years of phony rightist populism, corporate brigandage, and the wildly cheered abandonment of a common American civic purpose.

It is shocking that in America an argument for salvaging the common good is regarded as a radical notion by anyone, but that is where we are. And that is what Barack Obama seems to stand for.

After all, as a young man with his potential, he could have headed straight to midtown Manhattan and made a fortune. Instead, he took a church job working for poor people in Chicago, and for his troubles, he and those poor people have been viciously jeered by the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin.

Such is their regard for the common good. And such is Obama's promise. And in that, however inchoately and however diffidently, Obama stands not only against Bushism, but against Reaganism, which gave it birth. And that is more than enough.


Barack will not spend a penny of political capital indicting the war criminals, nor may he succeed in effecting meaningful healthcare reform, but he will return dignity and grace to the Oval Office, and to America's standing in the world and, today, that is enough.