Why I am voting for Barack Obama

I thought I’d take a few moments to help clarify my stance in the upcoming presidential election, in case anyone out there cares.

Obama’s healthcare plan, while not ideal or technically universal, goes much farther than McCain’s toward insuring all Americans. According to the US Congress Joint Economic Committee, there are 45.7 million uninsured people in the US (up by 18.8%, from 38.4 million, since Bush took office 8 years ago). We are the only industrialized nation to not offer universal healthcare in some form or another. This is a national disgrace, and I consider it to be one of the foremost "justice" issues facing our society. If our poor lack a right to decent healthcare because we choose (again) not to spend the money required, then greed has become our god and self-interest our chief virtue.

While Obama has displayed a willingness to defend our vaguely-defined “national interests” using military might that I am, quite frankly, a little uncomfortable with, he has repeatedly asserted that the cornerstone of his foreign policy will be diplomacy. He approaches the world with a more collaborative, nuanced perspective that I welcome heartily. One must compare this with the consistent bellicose posturing on the part of McCain in both past and present international crises. Obama does not oppose war, but he has opposed our war in Iraq from its misbegotten inception, and I consider this to be a positive sign and indicative of the stance that he will take when confronted with similar situations in the future.

While I personally deplore the practice of abortion, I also recognize that the prospect of overturning Roe v. Wade would be an unmitigated disaster and that 40 years of legal precedent will not evaporate with the appointment of an 8th (that’s right, 8th - out of 9) Republican justice. Considering McCain’s most recently articulated views in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade (and ignoring his past contradictions of this stance), I believe that Obama’s approach of providing additional support for young mothers is much more likely to bear fruit in the form of fewer terminated pregnancies, and the statistics back me up on this (under Clinton's policies, for example, abortion rates reached a 24 year low). That's a fantastic article on the issue that I just linked to back there if anyone cares to know more about actually preventing abortions rather than just getting angry over them every four years.

That being said, I consider abortion to be only a fraction of my pro-life stance. Being pro-war is not being pro-life. Supporting the death penalty is not being pro-life. Supporting foreign policies that continue to ignore the world's chronically impoverished is not being pro-life. I am personally committed to a consistent pro-life ethic that does not ignore the complexities of the real world. But I digress.

Even if I did not agree with Obama's position on a host of issues, I would like to think that I would have come to support him over McCain based solely on his conduct over the past weeks and months. He has offered steady, intelligent, clear-headed resolve that refuses to appeal to the lowest common denominator both on the campaign trail and in response to the economic crisis. It is telling, I think, that McCain's closing argument in his erratic campaign is a mixture of good old-fashioned 1950s style red-baiting coupled with his stubborn insistence that we don't know enough about a figure who has written two memoirs, held elected office for over a decade, and had been in an intense media spotlight for two full years as a candidate for president. To me that indicates an utter paucity of substance.

On Tuesday I will proudly cast my ballot for Barack Obama. While I do not hold any delusions about an end of racism in this country in the form of prejudice and discrimination, I still recognize that his election will be a powerful statement of a broad acceptance of a tolerant society with a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural future. It is not the final step in the Civil Rights movement, but only the next.

Vote Obama. Your grandchildren will thank you.