Obama for President

If you read my blog regularly, you already know that I support Barack Obama for President. Why do I support him? Because I support him on the issues; not on every single item but enough to matter.

Senator Obama has detailed policy papers on his campaign site. You can read his blueprint for change which provides the basics of his positions and plans, or you could go to each one of the issue pages and find lots of details:

• Civil Rights
• Defense
• Disabilities
• Economy
• Education
• Energy
• Ethics
• Faith
• Family
• Fiscal Policy
• Foreign Policy
  • Counter-terrorism plan (and speech)
  • Nuclear Weapons
• Healthcare
• Homeland Security
• Immigration
• Iraq War
• Poverty
• Rural Communities
• Public Service
• Seniors
• Technology
• Urban Policy
• Veterans Affairs
• Women Issues

Compared to the Republican nominee John McCain, there is a lot more detail in Obama’s issue pages.

Only Senator Obama offers a break from the last eight years’ disastrous policies. Senator McCain wants to stay in Iraq and start even more wars which would be worse than even the Bush administration. While Senator McCain has been confused between Sunni and Shia, the two major sects of Muslims, Senator Obama can pronounce Pakistan and Gandhi correctly, understands the region better and is humble enough to realize the limits of our knowledge. While McCain would lash out without thinking against Iraq, Iran, Russia or China, Obama has a smart plan to defeat the terrorists who attacked us on September 11.

Senator McCain has admitted that he doesn’t know a lot about economics while Senator Obama is focused on making life better for the average American. If you are worried about taxes, you shouldn’t be because you will be better off under the Obama tax plan compared to the McCain plan unless you are one of the super-rich top 0.1%. Also, David Leonhart shows that Obama is a pragmatic liberal with influence from the Chicago school of economics.

Senator Obama is somewhat new on the national stage and questions have been raised about his accomplishments. There is no doubt that Obama is a very intelligent guy and has risen fast due to his intelligence and a confluence of events where the American public is dissatisfied with the status quo and wants change. However, it’s not true that Senator Obama doesn’t have any accomplishments.

There [Senator Obama] was, working for nuclear non-proliferation and securing loose stockpiles of conventional weapons, like shoulder-fired missiles. There he was again, passing what the Washington Post called “the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet” — though not as strong as Obama would have liked. Look — he’s over there, passing a bill that created a searchable database of recipients of federal contracts and grants, proposing legislation on avian flu back when most people hadn’t even heard of it, working to make sure that soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were screened for traumatic brain injury and to prevent homelessness among veterans, successfully fighting a proposal by the VA to reexamine all PTSD cases in which full benefits had been awarded, working to ban no-bid contracts in Katrina reconstruction, and introducing legislation to criminalize deceptive political tactics and voter intimidation. And there he was again, introducing a tech plan.

Or consider Obama’s efforts to get all police interrogations recorded when he was in the Illinois legislature.

Consider a bill into which Obama clearly put his heart and soul. The problem he wanted to address was that too many confessions, rather than being voluntary, were coerced — by beating the daylights out of the accused.

Obama proposed requiring that interrogations and confessions be videotaped.

This seemed likely to stop the beatings, but the bill itself aroused immediate opposition. There were Republicans who were automatically tough on crime and Democrats who feared being thought soft on crime. There were death penalty abolitionists, some of whom worried that Obama’s bill, by preventing the execution of innocents, would deprive them of their best argument. Vigorous opposition came from the police, too many of whom had become accustomed to using muscle to “solve” crimes. And the incoming governor, Rod Blagojevich, announced that he was against it.

Obama had his work cut out for him.

He responded with an all-out campaign of cajolery. It had not been easy for a Harvard man to become a regular guy to his colleagues. Obama had managed to do so by playing basketball and poker with them and, most of all, by listening to their concerns. Even Republicans came to respect him. One Republican state senator, Kirk Dillard, has said that “Barack had a way both intellectually and in demeanor that defused skeptics.”

The police proved to be Obama’s toughest opponent. Legislators tend to quail when cops say things like, “This means we won’t be able to protect your children.” The police tried to limit the videotaping to confessions, but Obama, knowing that the beatings were most likely to occur during questioning, fought — successfully — to keep interrogations included in the required videotaping.

By showing officers that he shared many of their concerns, even going so far as to help pass other legislation they wanted, he was able to quiet the fears of many.

Obama proved persuasive enough that the bill passed both houses of the legislature, the Senate by an incredible 35 to 0. Then he talked Blagojevich into signing the bill, making Illinois the first state to require such videotaping.

Obama’s ethics reform bill in the Illinois legislature was called by the Washington Post as “the most ambitious campaign reform in nearly 25 years, making Illinois one of the best in the nation on campaign finance disclosure.”

You can read a summary about Obama’s efforts in the Senate or go in detail (1, 2, 3).

Being a cynic, I don’t believe Barack Obama to be perfect. But nobody is. He is, however, the better candidate by far. Therefore, instead of just voting for him or contributing to his campaign, I decided to take some action and volunteer to make Barack Obama the next President of the United States.

I was going to write about my experience with the volunteering effort here in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, but it’s too long already. So that will be next week. For now, I do want to point out the campaign donation graphic on the sidebar. Please donate to the Obama campaign by clicking here.