Back to the thread's topic, I have been thinking about why people should vote for Obama. All the deconstructionists, intellectuals and pundits who like to get wonky on platforms basically gravitate toward Hillary, possibly on the principle of "better the devil you know". And there is no question that Hillary has many sterling qualities -- she is fluent in programattica, quick with details, tough in a fight, and female (with all the iherent virtues that implies) and a mother. (And the risks, as well). She's pretty bright.

Obama, though, inspires people to step into the future in ways Hillary does not. His vision of where we could go has been sucked up and embedded whole cloth into all the other politicians speeches as their own, especially HIllary's. But he generated them originally.

I think Obama is plenty tough. But he has two young children, where H. has one almost fully grown clone. So he's a bit more vulnerable in some ways.

But these are secondary issues. The big lesson of the last decade is that when the chips are down, and we require the most from leadership, is in the face of the unexpected. Katrina, the World Trade Center, London terrorist strikes, were all pretty much blind-side events of magnitude, and the current administration failed miserably in dealing with the two that impacted us directly.

In this regard, I believe Obama is far more reliable a leader than Hillary. He has a greater depth of understanding of the whole spectrum of life in this country, while she has been a daughter of privelege and money all her life. His experience has been more directly with and for the real hard-working strata of the country. ANd most important, his heart is genuinely geared toward a vision of makign the world better, while I suspect hers is more oriented around personal success.

In the gfinal analysis, with all the complexities and details and chatter behind us, there is one bottom-line fundamental which weighs strongly in Barack Obama's favor in my thinking: he is a better human being than HIllary Clinton is. That is worth a lot of programmatics and worth more than a lot of cleverness.


A