Very excited! Got my absentee ballot in the mail yesterday!
I love both candidates, but it looks like I'm voting for Obama. So if you're a Clinton supporter, now is the time to give me reasons to change my mind!
OK, why I'm voting for Obama and not voting for Clinton
1. Senator Clinton has been wrong from the start on the invasion of Iraq, too slow to change her position and still unable (from arrogance or calculation) to acknowledge it fully. She was also wrong last year in giving Bush a green light to invade Iran, despite the Administration's imperialism, duplicity and ineptitude. She seems still to be a proponent of American hegemony, chronically willing to operate from a we/they dynamic.
2. She is personally expedient, and a calculating opportunist, consistently willing to say and do whatever seems marketable or negotiable, rather than operating from a solid core of intrinsic values.
3. I am deeply doubtful about her electability, due to her strong and intractable negatives, which she and her campaign are currently exacerbating in their unseemly efforts to discredit Obama. I think that she is likely to lose to McCain (independents going his way, disgruntled progressives and
young people opting out) and, in the process, harm the bottom of the ticket, reversing the Democrats' legislative momentum.
4. I'm apprehensive as well about the kind of President she would be, if she were elected -- a different gender but the same old my way or the highway. Transactional not transformative. micromanagement and clannishness. Mouthing change, but constitutionally inclined to politics as usual. Flawed judgment as in her assumption that the race would be over on Super Tuesday.
5. She is only recently able to manage her husband. We have been witness to his unsavory return from statesman-philanthropist to politics and self-indulgence as usual. I have deep skepticism about the prospect of the Presidency as a two-headed monstrosity and I dread the aftermath of another Clinton incumbency.
6. Hillary Clinton wants to stop the flow of jobs to other countries, however she does not acknowledge that it was her own husbands policies that was the impetus for such a tidle wave of job loss ie. NAFTA.
7. The Senator has been disingenuous about her experience. Five years as a legislator vs. ten for Obama; partner in a regional law firm in a small third-tier city. First Lady: largely ceremonial, except for the healthcare debacle. There is no hands-on management experience of any consequence, a shortcoming exacerbated by her arrogance and inability to acknowledge mistakes and her absence of a dependable internal guidance system.
8. I have the sense that Hillary Rodham Clinton no longer knows who she genuinely is, perhaps has not known since her work on the Watergate investigation. Support for her would be support for whom, and for what
9. I am appalled by her patterns of personal presumption, her ruthlessness and vindictiveness, as early as the gratuitous Travelgate firings and as recently as her surrogates' smears against Obama on a woman's right to choose and their (including President Clinton's) abhorrent scare-tactic
misrepresentations and innuendoes with regard to race and religion leading up to South Carolina.
10. Finally, circumstantially, she stands as an obstacle to a rare and extraordinary opportunity for an authentic revitalization of our national journey -- the election in Barack Obama of a brilliant and inspiring, multiracial, multicultural candidate who would provide an antidote and
corrective to the dark corrosive abominations of the Bush regime and who holds the promise of designing and building bold and necessary new strategies and practices, internationally and domestically, for the early years of this perilous century.
Why I am voting for Obama:
1. I feel he can truly bring people together from both sides of the aisle to effect change. He has done so in Illinois as well as Washington.
2. He does not take Federal Lobbyists or Pac money, rather he has an enormous grass roots effort taking place that has sustained his candidacy. He has said on numerous occasions that he will sit down with Lobbyists and listen to them, yet he will not be bound by them, or owe them favors.
3. He is interested in not just talking about bringing our troops home from Iraq, but actually doing it. He was opposed to the war from the start, showing good judgment and sound principals.
4. He is interested in restoring to the middle class what has been lost over the last seven years, and moving them forward, moving education forward, and he knows that it can be done, and has a plan to do it.
5. Obama is not running due to his own ambition, but due to what he calls quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King "the fierce urgency of now". We have all witnessed this, he knows it, we know it.
6. As he says we are not the red states, we are not the blue states, we are the United States, he's not the status quo, change is coming.
I would rather have Obama win because he is up to the challenge of changing politics, not just going along with them. It is that time.