obama

If I were to vote for the best campaign video for Obama, this one would get my vote.

Colin Powell has officially endorsed Obama for president. Here’s why his endorsement matters:

If you watch the entire video of Powell’s endorsement, you’ll see that his decision was not made lightly. He has known John McCain for many years, and has a great respect for him. Both Powell and McCain have military experience, although McCain left the military to serve the US in congress, while Powell went on to become a General in the US Army, National Security Advisor (1987–1989), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989–1993), and the nation’s first African-American Secretary of State (2001–2005). He may be the Republican that both Republican and Democratic Americans respect the most, although it may take a bit longer for some folks to completely forgive him for his UN speech on Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, a speech that Powell himself calls a “blot” on his record.

(Update, 10/20/08 - Another general comes out for Obama. “Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office—I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency.”)

While listening to Powell’s endorsement interview, notice that he shows a deep concern for the actions and character of the two candidates, and specifically calls McCain out for his negative campaign tactics and the poor judgment he displayed in his selection of an unqualified candidate for Vice President. Although Powell doesn’t specifically use the words “Commander in Chief” in the interview, he clearly believes Obama has the intelligence and character to lead the United States in a time of crisis. McCain, on the other hand, has shown himself willing to divide the country along class and cultural lines, a ‘leadership’ style that cannot be condoned by someone who truly puts America first, as Powell has always done.

History has shown us that people are easiest to control when they’re scared. McCain and the Republican party are doing a fairly good job of transforming our current fear over our financial future into fear of the ’socialist’ and ‘anti-American’ policies of his opponent. I haven’t seen this kind of fear-mongering in American politics since the Goldwater candidacy. Honorable Republican leaders disowned Goldwater then, just as many are doing now, but the class warfare that Goldwater ignited did not go away when that election was over. There are some genies that you just can’t put back in the bottle.

If Obama overcomes the Republican smear campaign and wins this election, many Americans will undoubtedly hold on to the belief, deliberately fomented by the McCain campaign, that Obama represents an insidious anti-American cadre of radicals. If McCain loses the election, there is no doubt that he will try to do the honorable thing and tell the American people that “he didn’t really mean it” when he insinuated that Obama was a baby-killing terrorist - but at that point his followers are unlikely to believe him. That’s why other highly-regarded Republicans, like Colin Powell, will be needed so much in the months following the election.

Colin Powell believes that Barack Obama is the best man to lead America in this troubling time. And one thing Powell understands best is the kind of character it takes to be a true leader.

The following article is by Wick Allison, and appeared on dmagazine.com

THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.

In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.

Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.

But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.

Write to wicka@dmagazine.com.