Like many politically minded individuals, I have a tendency (my wife would probably choose the word "compulsion") to collect interesting articles and editorials to save for future reference.
It was within my enormous and ever-expanding Obama file, pulled out earlier today so that I might research past Obama statements for an editorial that I am writing, that I found and enjoyed re-reading a number of wonderful, personal testimonials of support for Sen. Barack Obama.
I wanted to share with my fellow Kossacks several excerpts from these testimonials that I found - and I hope that you will find - inspiring.
To start things off, however, let's begin with The Seattle Times. In what probably is the first major newspaper endorsement of the fall general election campaign, the Times' editorial board had these words to say in its endorsement of Barack Obama on September 19th, 2008:
At a time of huge challenge, the candidate with the intelligence, temperament and judgment to lead our nation to a better place is Sen. Barack Obama.
Obama should be the next president of the United States because he is the most qualified change agent. Obama is a little young, but also brilliant. If he sometimes seems brainy and professorial, that’s OK. We need the leader of the free world to think things through, carefully. We have seen the sorry results of shooting from the hip...
Our country is on the wrong track. Average, middle-class citizens have lost confidence that if they work hard, they can improve their lives, afford to send their kids to college and not be tossed out of their homes.
American optimism has been wracked by President George W. Bush and a previous Republican Congress. If you want change, you do not keep what is essentially the same team in power. You try something different. You vote for the stronger matchup, Obama and Sen. Joseph Biden, a smart and steady hand on foreign policy and other matters...
(Obama) makes up for a thin resume with integrity, judgment, and fresh ideas. Obama can get America moving forward again.
Caroline Kennedy, daughter of President John F. Kennedy, penned these wonderful words for the New York Times back on January 27th of this year, in an opinion-editorial that received widespread attention:
Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.
We have that opportunity with Senator Obama...
I want a president who understands that his responsibility is to articulate a vision and encourage others to achieve it; who holds himself, and those around him, to the highest ethical standards; who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe again that our country needs every one of us to get involved.
I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president – not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.
I am so very glad I kept this opinion-editorial written by author Michael Chabon, which ran in the Washington Post on February 4th:
The point of Obama’s candidacy is that the damaged state of the American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants, or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear...
To support Obama, we must permit ourselves to feel hope, to acknowledge the possibility that we can aspire as a nation to be more than merely secure or predominant. We must allow ourselves to believe in Obama, not blindly or unquestioningly as we might believe in some demagogue or figurehead but as we believe in the comfort we take in our families, in the pleasure of good company, in the blessings of peace and liberty, in any thing that requires us to put our trust in the best part of ourselves and others. That kind of belief is a revolutionary act. It holds the power, in time, to overturn and repair all the damage that our fear has driven us to inflict on ourselves and the world.
And when we all wake up on Nov. 5, 2008, to find that we have made Barack Obama the president of the United States, the world is already going to feel, to all of us, a little different, a little truer to its, and our, better nature. It is part of the world’s nature and of our own to break, ruin, and destroy; but it is also our nature and the world’s to find ways to mend what has been broken. We can do that. Come on. Don’t be afraid.
Rolling Stone magazine endorsed Obama, and put him on its now-famous cover, in its March 2008 edition. The editorial, entitled A New Hope, was authored by Jann S. Wenner:
The tides of history or rising higher and faster these days. Read them right and ride them, or be crushed. And then 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...
Obama has emerged by displaying precisely the kind of character and judgment we need in a president: renouncing the politics of fear, speaking frankly on the most pressing issues facing the country and sticking to his principles...
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. And in electing an African-American, we also profoundly renounce an ugliness and violence in our national character that have been further stoked by our president in these last eight years...
Fellow University of Chicago law professor, preeminent legal scholar, and renowned author Cass R. Sunstein had these kind words to say of Obama in an opinion-editorial which was published in early March 2008:
At the University of Chicago, Obama is liked and admired by both Republicans and Democrats. Some local Reagan enthusiasts are Obama supporters. Why? It doesn’t hurt that he’s a great guy, with a personal touch and a lot of warmth. It certainly helps that he is exceptionally able.
But niceness and ability are only part of the story. Obama has a genuinely independent mind, he’s a terrific listener, and he goes wherever reason takes him...
The Obama we know is no rhetorician; he shines not because he can move people, but because of his problem-solving abilities, creativity, and attention to detail...
As president, Obama would set a new tone in U.S. politics. He refuses to demonize his political opponents; deep in his heart, I believe, he doesn’t think of them as opponents. It would not be surprising to find Republicans and independents prominent in his administration.
Obama wants to know what ideas are likely to work, not whether a Democrat or Republican is responsible for them...In short, Obama’s approach is insistently charitable. He assumes decency and good faith on the part of those who disagree with him. And he wants to hear what they have to say...
From knowing Obama for many years, I have no doubts about his ability to lead. He knows a great deal, and he is a quick learner. Even better, he knows what he does not know, and there is no question that he would assemble an accomplished, experienced team of advisers...
As president, Barack Obama would be a genuine uniter. If he proves able to achieve great things, for his nation and for the world, it will be above all for that reason.
And, finally, in what is still my favorite article about Obama, Atlantic Monthly writer and blogger Andrew Sullivan had this to say what seems a lifetime ago, back in December 2007, in an article entitled Goodbye To All That:
Obama’s candidacy...is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America – finally – past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us...
At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war – not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade – but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war – and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama – and Obama alone – offers the possibility of a truce...
If you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.
We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.