Obama and McCain
02/03/2008
Email to a friendPost a CommentPrinter-friendly
SO IT may all come down to Super Tuesday.
And, lo and behold, New Yorkers are set to play an important part in that presidential nomination process, a historical rarity.
So it is that we today break with tradition and endorse candidates for the Democratic and Republican nominations.
The Democratic race has come down to a choice between upstart Sen. Barack Obama, of Illinois, and New York's favorite daughter, Sen. Hillary Clinton. Which puts this page in a very strange position, indeed, having endorsed Clinton for re-election only one year ago. Clinton earned that endorsement, without reservation, by being a steady and effective senator in her first term.
But while being an effective major politician may be a necessary prerequisite for serious consideration as president, such experience is not by itself sufficient. Other qualities are in play and it is other qualities that should give pause to Democratic voters.
IT HAS become painfully clear in the last few weeks that Clinton's marriage is both the partnership that propelled her political career and a very considerable baggage.
To put it bluntly, former President Bill Clinton is even less likely to content himself with baking cookies in the White House than she was. Therein would lie a world of trouble.
When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he suggested the Bill-Hillary team would give voters "two for the price of one" if he were elected. The ensuing uproar was, in some quarters, attacked as unenlightened in the modern age. But the voters had it right. The confused lines of decision-making subsequently created in the White House by Hillary Clinton's power are well-documented.
This campaign, with the incessant and divisive yapping of the ex-president on behalf of his wife, leaves little doubt that voters truly are being asked to vote for a "Billary" ticket, a Clinton Restoration to the throne. That's a disturbing prospect.
The executive branch is constitutionally meant to be concentrated in the hands of a single person and does not well tolerate the split authority created by a power marriage.
IT'S ALSO obvious that, after 15 years of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the nation despairs of the increasingly sharp partisanship of Washington politics. One can argue about who is responsible. But this campaign has made clear that an inflexible, bipolar framing of politics as a do-anything-to-win proposition is in the political DNA of the Clintons.
Hillary Clinton's recent attempted smear of Obama for a passing relationship to a campaign donor was mind-blowing, suggesting she embraces Washington politics as the very blood sport by which she was once victimized.
Moreover, the Clinton approach today stands in stark relief to the alternative being offered by Obama, whose plain sense and nuanced consideration of competing choices and whose stirring oratory appeal simultaneously to the nation's highest shared values and its better angels.
We do look forward to the day when one of the major parties nominates a woman as its candidate for the presidency. The nation will be better for it when one does.
But Obama is a better candidate and should be chosen for that reason. In the event, the party simply would defer one history-making nomination for another - the first nomination of a black candidate by a major party. Not for the sake of tokenism, but because this candidate is highly capable, demonstrates the character to govern and grow in office, and has energized large numbers of Americans across a wide spectrum.
We endorse Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for president.
http://www.dailyfreeman.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=19253855&BRD=1769&PAG=461&dept_id=82701&rfi=6
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
