Oh, the Sweet Smell of Being Right

On the eve of the critical Indiana and North Carolina primaries, I would like to reflect on the quality and character of the candidates that are still in this race as of today. I have been alive for over half a century now, and have lived through the ups and downs of many a candidate on both sides of the aisle. I have been waiting for a person like Barack Obama to come along for – well, forever, I guess.
Barack is not perfect, as he constantly reminds us, but he embodies so many of the qualities that we seek in our representatives: Honesty, eloquence, charisma, intelligence, education, experience, and maybe the most appealing qualities to me, consistency and decorum. The other two candidates possess many of these fine qualities, as well, but they are significantly lacking in a couple of the more important ones, honesty and consistency.
Hillary Clinton has entertained us with originally agreeing that Michigan and Florida shouldn’t count, now arguing vigorously that delegates from those states should be seated immediately and even having the gall to boast that she has more popular votes by counting these states in the mix. It took her years to even acknowledge that she foolishly and mistakenly voted in the Senate to allow George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq should he choose to, and she has been handing the Republicans talking points for months by praising John McCain while belittling Barack Obama, at one point even pointing out that she and McCain were ready to be commander-in-chief, while Obama had merely given a speech in 2002.
More recently, she out and out lied about being under sniper fire on a Bosnian air strip. She has been touting a moratorium on the gas tax this summer, which is supported by not one economist nor apparently anyone in Congress, and has been criticizing Obama every chance she gets for wishing to keep the tax in place since it pays for road and bridge repair and would put thousands out of work if the tax holiday were enacted.
John McCain gets a major boost for having been an Air Force pilot and having spent time in a prisoner of war camp, but yet he equivocates on torture when pressed on it. He originally came out against the Bush tax cuts for the top two percent of the wealthiest people in this country, now calling for it to be made permanent. He had difficulties keeping the parties straight in Iraq and other parts of the world, but simply shrugged it off and apparently got away with it. He more recently candidly admitted that we went to war with Iraq to protect our country’s interest in their oil, and is now running a Spanish language website when two years ago he voted to make English the official language of this country.
Barack Obama may be too nice and too tolerant. If that is his only flaw, I will easily accept it. Many of us have been constantly calling for him to go on the attack to counter the false and misinformation lobbed against him, but he just won’t do it. That is the kind of guy he is. He has been campaigning on the same message with many of the same slogans since he announced his candidacy. Clinton, on the other hand, has changed her slogan or her message from one day to the next. I have even heard her adopt a southern accent when she’s speaking to a southern crowd. Let’s remember that she is a woman of the people while Barack is an elitist snob.
Admittedly, Barack is not as seasoned a campaigner as the other two candidates are, but as I have heard before, experience is not the only barometer that we should look at. What is that experience? Did we all support Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond because they had about a century and a half of experience? I know I didn’t.
Hillary Clinton has had to essentially hide her husband because his comments were offensive and were hurting her, plus she had to jettison her chief advisor Mark Penn because he was representing a country’s trade policies that were diametrically opposed to her own. John McCain flies around in a plane with working lobbyists and actually seeks counsel and endorsement from religious figures who espouse highly offensive and incredibly ridiculous rhetoric.
Although Obama has been successful and won more delegates in so-called red states, large states, southern states, eastern states, primaries and caucuses alike, the Clintons have declared that certain states just shouldn’t count. McCain, like Clinton, has attempted to re-invent himself several different times, while Senator Obama has been learning, growing, looking more and more presidential and really quietly and consistently collecting pledged delegates from the voters and superdelegates.
I recognize that I can come up with many more examples of why Barack is a great candidate and Hillary or John McCain leave a lot to be desired. I know you can come up with plenty, as well. I do feel that I’ve made my point.
Whatever the outcome of this presidential race, I am immensely proud to have been working for the past year and two months on the Obama campaign. He is a wonderful man, and his candidacy has drawn thousands if not millions to become fired up and involved in our political process. I do expect Barack to win, and I will continue to give all of my free time and put forth all of my persuasive powers to his campaign and encouraging people to cast their vote for Obama.