Here is a version of a letter I am sending out to audiences that include Republicans. I appreciate any suggestions for making it more effective in reaching the unconverted. Maybe you may find some of the arguments useful for your own outreach.
I am voting for Obama. The fears and anxieties I keep hearing about Obama are outlandish, paranoid, and highly unrealistic. The same goes for some of the hopes for his presidency. I don't see either coming to pass. So why vote for him?
The main reason is Sarah Palin. I would have voted Democratic anyways because the Republicans need to pay a price for gutting our civil liberties and following reckless foreign and economic policies. McCain seemed the sanest in their stable but his choice of Palin was a huge mistake at a time when we need wise leadership.
I prefer an actual constitutional scholar to someone who thinks that criticisms of her violate the first amendment. Someone who has lived overseas will have a more realistic view of what America has to deal with than one that takes Alaska's proximity to Russia as foreign policy experience. Sarah Palin reminds me of a student who hasn't done her homework and tries to fake it on the exam.
I see in Obama the wisdom to seek rational solutions to major problems. The Republican propagandists have done their best to vilify some of the professors Obama has associated with but don't let that distract you from his readiness to draw upon the accumulated wisdom in universities. Bush blew off that source of advice and led us into Iraq.
The candidates' plans are minor distractions, though I am glad they have thought things through. That all can get hashed out in the legislative process. I don't care if my taxes are a little higher or a little lower so long as government is investing in infrastructure that strengthens the whole economy: roads, bridges, disaster prevention, and education.
I believe that larger-scale organizations and companies work best when they are well-regulated. Companies shouldn't mind regulation of the sort that applies to its competitors across the board and keeps destructive tendencies in check such as oppression of labor, destruction of the environment, and cannibalization of the economy. Republican propagandists repeat the words socialist and liberal over and over again as if they were bad things only to distract you from the potential of using some of the resources of this country to try and solve its problems.
McCain pushed for replacing social security with investments in the stock market. It made sense in his free-market faith when the market was strong but fortunately he was ineffective.
The smaller scale should be unregulated and the state should leave us alone to make our decisions based on the information we have, as we are individually in the best position to know what is best for us. Hayek was right on that. I don't trust either party to protect our freedoms. We must do that ourselves by exercising them. I will have to support groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation as bulwarks of civil society.
I am most alarmed by politicians who would appoint superstitious Christian conservatives to positions where they can block rational solutions to real problems. Remember James Watt in the Reagan administration who claimed that the government did not need to protect the environment because Jesus was coming any day. Also, evangelicals threaten the equal citizenship of people who do not follow their sexual codes. They've got a right to preserve their own culture and to raise questions about the importance of life when it is inconvenient, but not to cheat in elections to impose their views on the rest of us. Sex education and freely available contraception are much more effective than severe laws in reducing the abortion rate. Democrats have gotten the anti-gun crowd to STFU, and I wish Republicans would do the same to the anti-gay and anti-sex faction. Palin's real connections with Christian dominionists are a bigger threat than Obama's imaginary connections with Muslims.
You may think conservative judges are wonderful but they are the ones who back the right of companies to screw over their employees. Conservative propagandists use religious issues to delude screwed-over workers into voting for their real enemy.
Third party candidates? Abstaining? If you vote for none of the above, you still get one or the other. I'm almost exactly Obama's age (close enough to refute Astrology) and have seen a lot of third parties come and go. They are useless collections of cranks and fools. America's parties are enormous, shifting coalitions and cannot express some pure party line.
You don't like his name or his face? He is anomalous, and anomalous people can rise above their situations and the illusions of sheeple like Nietzsche's overman. He will have some unusual problems like umpteenth Kenyan cousins pleading for favors but I trust he will disappoint them. If you can't get past his demographics, then go ahead and vote for some third party but please don't get in the way of America's making a clean break with the Bush era.
I have a few reservations about him but none will keep me from voting for him:
A) His platitudes! I will have to tune them out.
B) The danger of one-party rule: American democracy I think works bet when the parties keep each other in check. But I don't see the Democrats as capable of unity as the Republicans were during the height of the Abramoff/DeLay period when they were brazenly corrupt, pushing to become a permanent totalitarian party, and issuing choreographed talking points to the media. Even the NY Times was going along with them then.
C) He reminds me too much of Tony Blair, who helped Britain recover from Thatcher but in his youthful enthusiasm and legislative omnipotence supported Bush in Iraq and transformed Britain into an Orwellian surveillance state. An active citizenry can prevent that.
Obama/Biden 2008!