Obama for President

On the heels of Senator Kennedy, I am officially announcing my support of Barack Obama for President.

If I was to vote on this past Friday afternoon I would have cast my ballot for Hillary Clinton. And yes, because she is a woman. Gender is a huge issue to me and I believe it should be a huge issue to every one of us. Women and men alike suffer from gender inequality in our country every damn day. Having a woman in the presidency would not be a "novelty", as my commenter suggested. What if any candidate could get up in front of a thousand people and cry when s/he feels like it? When Clinton did it, critics claimed she was "using the gender card" but if any man did it, he would likely be considered weak. I may be idealistic, but I dream of the day when anyone--man or woman--can get up on stage and cry when s/he is so moved and their audience will accept those tears as a simple expression of emotion in the moment. We will all be healthier when we reach the day that everyone can cry as freely as they laugh. I plan to hold onto this dream and continue to encourage all of you to raise your gender awareness, but I have decided that voting on this dream would be selfish, misdirected, and frankly, not enough.

Politically speaking, I favor John Edwards the most of the candidates left in the race (so long, Sen.Rep. Kuchinich.) Senator Edwards has been on the road with the same message since he lost the race to become vice pres three and a half years ago. He's an anti-corporate crusader out to raise awareness about poverty, something that is ignored too often. I commend him and I am glad he is sticking with it until the bitter end. I hope he comes back again, too. Because, as the media coverage he isn't getting reflects, right now is not his time.

Right now is the time for re-branding in America. We have spent the last seven years with a man in charge that has brought down both our domestic sense of pride and our international image. On the relatively harmless side of the spectrum, I think about how every bookstore cash register in America seems to be laden with novelty items mocking our leader's intelligence. When our citizens travel over seas we take on a Canadian identity to hide from the ridicule that seems currently inherent in being American. On the more frightening side, more children are born into an over-seas culture of hating this nation every day. Our troops and theirs continue to be killed, injured and mentally scarred on the battle grounds of the war on terror. While our government continues to force feed "American values" across the planet, a great deal of us living in this land of the free ironically feel ashamed to be American at all. This is no small problem. The urge to change this status has created the ideal climate for big change.

This brings me to Friday night and a good talk I had with my new friend, Seth. Without knowing, Seth went on a campaign to convince me to support Obama with the best argument anyone could have presented to me, an argument about image. He pointed me to Andrew Sullivan's article in the Atlantic, "Goodbye to All that: Why Obama Matters." I encourage you to read it, but allow me to share my favorite passage that encapsulates the point I am going for beautifully:

Consider this hypothetical. It's November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America's soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama's face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

Seth convinced me to face my own naive selfishness involved in voting for Clinton next month. If I were to vote for her, I would be voting on behalf of gender equality. I would also be voting for a name that the whole world recognizes and associates with these United States. To us there might be huge changes involved in shifting from Bush to Clinton to Bush and back to Clinton. But on a global scale would there be any reason for people to trust that we want change at all?

I am optimistic that one day we will be able to judge a person by the "content of their character." While we strive for a more collective critical awareness, we remain in a media age where image matters whether we like it or not. For right now, I am going to settle with the thought that we can be the first generation to elect a leader that does not belong to a racial majority. I need to believe that this will be a huge step toward changing our hearts and minds about assumptions we collectively hold based on the way we look, our personal histories and even our gender.

Barack Obama can be the boost we need. Who's with me?