Philadelphia Weekly Endorses Obama

[Hope And Change]

Endorsement: Obama


http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/?inc=vid&id=652158">»Video: Philadelphia loves Obama.

Surprised with our choice?

We suspect not.

Obama is clearly the expected PW preference.

In fact, when it comes to endorsements in general, Obama’s the king.

Will Smith. Kerry. Oprah. Kennedys.

George Clooney. Scarlett Johansson, for gosh sake.

On Sunday the Los Angeles Times endorsed Obama.

La Opinión, the largest Spanish-language paper in L.A., did too.

Even the Inquirer rubber-stamped Obama.

So our choice is hardly a bombshell.

We could’ve gone with Ron Paul.

If nothing else, it would’ve kept our inbox filled for months.

Happily, though, we got a grip.

We’re supporting Barack Obama for a lot of reasons.

Here’s the one reason that may be most important: He shares nothing in common with the most morally and spiritually destructive president of our lifetime.

George W. Bush.

Obama sees the planet and those who live in it with a complexity Bush could only imagine.

For eight long years, our ears stung with Bush’s rhetoric of arrogance, fear and condescension. His management style was two-faced, greedy and egotistical. We grew ashamed of our government for valuing secrecy and duplicity over transparency and compassion.

Lots of countries, many our longtime friends, started to really dislike us. In once happy-to-see-us places like Europe and Mexico, they looked at us with suspicion. What had they done to us?

Here, at our places of work, the anomie grew. Corporations and CEOs grew greedy with the tax cuts. Management stopped listening to employees. The mantra became to leave no crumbs on the table. In the workplace, the decisions made by country club bosses began to mimic how things were done in the White House: creepily, ominously, on the sly, without buy-in from the workers.

Bush and his cohorts, meanwhile, worked tirelessly to convince us of the need to get them before they got us.

The evildoers.

They were everywhere.

Over there. Here too.

In our community.

Next door.

Get the duct tape.

What’s the color-code?




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Obama never bought it.
Never bought the Bush concept of control through fear; of saber-rattling instead of negotiating; of the need for torture to get information and defeat an enemy.

From the start, Obama never thought this war was worth our blood, our character, our reputation. He doesn’t oppose all wars, he says—only the “dumb wars.”

And he saw this one as dumb from the start.

Obama’s policies on the economy, immigration, the need for diplomacy with our friends and enemies are reasoned, mature and thoughtful. They’ve grown vigilantly nuanced. He makes us listen carefully.

If his understanding were lacking in any of the issues of the day, his opponents and the media would thoroughly expose him.

What we build up, we love to tear down.

But Obama has been playing big-league ball, and he’s been the phenom all season. His strength comes from his soul, which is where he finds his words.

Is he ready to be president day one?

Yep.

But it’s his ambition for us all—to reach higher, to think grandly—that seals the deal.




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A few words about his opponent.
Sen. Clinton is a tireless worker and has long supported the rights of children and workers.

The New York Times said this in its endorsement of Hillary Clinton: “We know that she is capable of both uniting and leading. We saw her going town by town through New York in 2000, including places where Clinton-bashing was a popular sport.”

They also called her “brilliant.”

Against all predictions, she’s become a first-class senator.

How much we’d give to have her instead of Specter or Casey representing Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate.

When it comes to healthcare, her understanding of what needs to be done is second to none.

Her plan (as well as former candidate John Edwards’ plan) has always been the most impressive.

It’s universal.

It leaves no gray areas.

And Philadelphia, remember, is a Clinton city. President Bill Clinton won Philadelphia mightily—twice, and his appearances here made the difference for John Street when he was running for mayor.

Clintons don’t forget who’s good to them.

It’s why you see Rendell and Nutter neatly lined up behind Hillary.

They know where the bread is buttered.

If Hillary Clinton becomes president, there’ll be no howl from these quarters.




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But.
This is the defining moment.

The moment when we could transform who we are as a country and as a culture.

Anxiety is great everywhere—over the war, the economy and the future. But more so in Philadelphia and other large urban centers where violence takes no quarter.

Obama, a former Chicago community organizer, knows city streets. He’s worked them, and not so long ago. He knows the language of the streets, and what causes the pain.

He’d react to violence in Southwest Philly as he would to car bombs on the streets of Baghdad: by offering a rational and indisputable logic. Stay in that life—or move to one with real possibilities. He sees his job as providing those possibilities.

“We’re tired of being divided,” Obama says often when giving his stump speech. “We are tired of running into ideological walls and partisan roadblocks. We’re tired of appeals to our worst instincts and our greatest fears.”

And he says this: “Don’t let anybody tell you we don’t know what we stand for. Don’t doubt yourselves. We know who we are. And in the end we know that it’s not enough just to say that we’ve had enough. We’ve got a story to tell that isn’t just against something but is for something. We know that we’re the party of opportunity.”

It’s been a long, long time since we’ve heard rhetoric of hope spoken by a person of such extraordinary moral strength.

“The arc of the moral universe is long,” Obama often says, quoting Martin Luther King Jr., “but it bends toward justice.”

In this very special moment, Obama has us believing that just may be true.

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