Barack Obama continues to roll up the endorsements from a wide variety of people and sources. Not only have dozens of stodgy old newspaper editorial boards given him their seal of approval, now he's also getting the nod from younger hipper media. This time it's Rolling Stone magazine whose readership reaches a good demographic for Obama. They call their endorsement article A New Hope and what a glowing endorsement it is.
...along comes Barack Obama, with the kinds of gifts that appear in politics but once every few generations. There is a sense of dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a resolute discipline. It's not just that he is eloquent — with that ability to speak both to you and to speak for you — it's that he has a quality of thinking and intellectual and emotional honesty that is extraordinary.
They have far less flattering things to say about Hillary Clinton. In fact, you could even say they weren't very impressed with her at all.
All this was made clearer by the contrast with Hillary Clinton, a capable and personable senator who has run the kind of campaign that reminds us of what makes us so discouraged about our politics. Her campaign certainly proved her experience didn't count for much: She was a bad manager and a bad strategist who naturally and easily engaged in the politics of distraction, trivialization and personal attack. She never convinced us that her vote for the war in Iraq was anything other than a strategic political calculation that placed her presidential ambitions above the horrifying consequences of a war.
Besides her support for the war, they didn't like her ties to corporate lobbyists and the fact she takes so many contributions from them. Another advantage over Clinton that stood out for them was his repudiation of the politics of fear and Republican fear mongering.
Obama rejected the subtle imagery of false patriotism by not wearing a flag pin in his lapel, and he dismissed the broader notion that the Democratic Party had to find a way to buy into this entire load of fear-mongering War on Terror bullshit — to out-Republican the Republicans — and thus become, in his description of Hillary Clinton's macho posturing on foreign policy, little more than "Bush-Cheney lite."
I like their summation. It coincides with my personal feelings about Barack and why his presidency will be so important to the country.
We need to recover the spiritual and moral direction that should describe our country and ourselves. We see this in Obama, and we see the promise he represents to bring factions together, to achieve again the unity that drives great change and faces difficult, and inconvenient, truths and peril.
We need to send a message to ourselves and to the world that we truly do stand for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Update - This is the first time Rolling Stone has ever endorsed a candidate in the primaries. They also have a lengthy story here on the genius of Obama's ground game and how his community organizer roots have changed the sport of politics forever.