{"id":85,"date":"2008-02-05T09:56:04","date_gmt":"2008-02-05T16:56:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.talesfromthe.net\/jon\/?p=85"},"modified":"2008-02-05T09:56:04","modified_gmt":"2008-02-05T16:56:04","slug":"choosing-hope-over-fear-obama-08","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/2008\/02\/05\/choosing-hope-over-fear-obama-08\/","title":{"rendered":"Choosing hope over fear: Obama &#8217;08"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"sb_messagebody\">A lot of people have written great posts on why they support Barack Obama and his campaign; so I&#8217;ll keep it quick, and link out to others who have taken the time to give more details and say things better.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>A lot of people say &#8220;they&#8217;re no different on the issues&#8221;. I disagree.  There are major differences on four issues I care about a lot: civil liberties, the war, immigration, and LGBT rights.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>civil liberties<\/strong>:  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.talesfromthe.net\/jon\/\/?p=77#comment-459\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Obama&#8217;s good<\/a> &#8212; not perfect, but better than any president we&#8217;ve ever had. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, supports garnishing wages and presumably other enforcement for her mandatory health insurance plan, <a href=\"http:\/\/firedoglake.com\/2007\/12\/10\/hillary-clinton-joins-joe-lieberman-to-resurrect-the-culture-wars\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wants to censor videogames<\/a>, and did not object when her husband signed the CDA and COPA, expanded wiretapping, and approved warrantless searches. He supports net neutrality; she opposes it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>the war<\/strong>. He advocates a firm timeframe for withdrawal, and his opposition from day 1 will help restore American credibility; he also, in my opinon, has a more accurate analysis of the situation. I also think he&#8217;ll make future wars less likely (for example his willingness, unlike Hillary Clinton, to engage personally with &#8220;hostile&#8221; leaders); Chris Bowers <a href=\"http:\/\/www.openleft.com\/showDiary.do?diaryId=3282\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">discussed this well<\/a>. She still won&#8217;t admit that she was wrong when she voted for the war; for that matter, neither she nor her husband has ever disavowed the sanctions policy that led to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths <em>and<\/em> did nothing to prevent the war.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>LGBT rights<\/strong>: while far from perfect (both candidates oppose gay marriage and support the military&#8217;s exemption from campus anti-discrimination policies), Barack Obama is distinctly better than Hillary Clinton. He supports a full repeal of the federal &#8220;Defense of Marriage Act&#8221;; and he supports an inclusive Employee Non-Discrimination Act. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.talesfromthe.net\/jon\/\/?p=72\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">More here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>immigration:<\/strong> He&#8217;s marched on May 1; she opposes drivers&#8217; licenses for undocumented immigrants.   And this is as good a place as any to point out that she never spoke against her husband&#8217;s &#8220;welfare reform&#8221; policy.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are some other important differences as well, but come on &#8230; isn&#8217;t this enough?<\/p>\n<p>Of course it&#8217;s not just the issues. <a href=\"http:\/\/clintonattacksobama.pbwiki.com\/Incident+Tracker\">The Clinton campaign&#8217;s repeated racist speech<\/a> is appalling, as is the voter-suppression lawsuit in Nevada and her decision to break the agreement with her opponents and campaign in Florida are classic Rovian &#8212; and Clintonian &#8212; maneuvers; I&#8217;m tired of politics like that. Obama&#8217;s ability to galvanize involvement from younger and first-time voters has a chance to rewrite the political map, starting with the 2008 election and building on it. His strategic and out-of-the-box thinking during the campaign (the use of social networks; his head speechwriter is a 24-year-old; actively going on Spanish-language radio after the Kennedy endorsement; going on The Billerico Project) has really impressed me. I think his ability to work across partisan divides, trans-partisan as well bi-partisanship, will help him be very effective at making progress on his platform.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and I like and respect his wife a lot better than I like her husband.<\/p>\n<p>Ever since my first election, I&#8217;ve looked forward to being able to vote for a candidate who&#8217;s not a straight white male who&#8217;s got a real chance at becoming the President of the United States of America. And in November, I&#8217;ll have a chance to. How cool is that? But that&#8217;s not enough.<\/p>\n<p>If Obama&#8217;s the Democratic nominee, I&#8217;ll also have a chance to vote for somebody who I think can really change the world.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"sb_messagebody\">A change is coming.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.achangeiscoming.net\/e-luminatus\/index.php?title=A_change_is_coming\">I choose hope<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>jon<\/p>\n<p>PS: A few of the many other posts I read that had an influence on me: Matt McGinty&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/topic.php?uid=6815841748&amp;topic=4457\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">letter to friends and family<\/a> in the Facebook Obama discussion group, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zephoria.org\/thoughts\/archives\/2008\/01\/31\/my_february_5_v.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> danah boyd<\/a>, on the new\/old media distinction; Jack Turner&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/jackandjillpolitics.blogspot.com\/2008\/01\/clintons-black-folk-and-america.html\">The Clintons , Black Folk, and America: A reckoning<\/a> on Jack and Jill Politics; Michael Chabon&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2008\/02\/03\/AR2008020302526.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Phobocracy;<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailykos.com\/storyonly\/2008\/2\/4\/93959\/63264\/87\/449429\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Meteor Blades<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailykos.com\/storyonly\/2008\/2\/4\/01850\/33681\/211\/449297\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">DHinMi <\/a> on Kos;  the New York Times civil rights editorial; the many great analyses in the Women of Color and anti-racist blogospheres of Gloria Steinem&#8217;s &#8220;oppression olympics&#8221; piece in the New York Times; and endorsements from Oprah, Caroline Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, and Maria Shriver.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A lot of people have written great posts on why they support Barack Obama and his campaign; so I&#8217;ll keep it quick, and link out to others who have taken the time to give more details and say things better. A lot of people say &#8220;they&#8217;re no different on the issues&#8221;. I disagree. There are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[20,77,131,245,269],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-political","tag-2008-election","tag-clinton","tag-election","tag-obama","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}