Photo: Vanity Fair – Raising Obama
New Yorker: The Editors
October 13, 2008 Issue
Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?
The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.
The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure. Read more.
My sisters and brothers,
I think regardless of who endorsed Obama and who is not or what the talking heads said or not.
The choice is clear. If you want change; look into all the facts of this election. and then VOTE!
This time it is upto each and everyone of us to Vote and help get the Vote out.
http://www.voteforchange.com
YES WE CAN!
Begudu
This is a fantastic piece! Can’t imagine how one could remain undecided with all the fundamental differences put in plain view.
I am glad that the New Yorker endorsed Obama. It is an important endorsement, as far as media endorsements go!
I have been trying to think of how I can definitively define Obama for myself. The photo by Vanity Fair is fantastic because it tells a personal story of the subject.
What does Obama represent? This questions begs an answer not only of Obama’s stand on major issues, but also, most imporatntly, what kind of an image would Obama project as President of the United States. What does the image of this handsome, alert, calm, collected, clearly very intelligent (Harvard Law), and by all accounts a good-natured person and, to some extent, exotic (he was raised as all-American boy by his white mother – lovingly protective – and his white grandparents. Unfortunately, his black father (African student in America, Harvard, Ph.D) was missing in action in Obama’s life (he worked as a government economist in Kenya and was killed by a car accident in 1982, around the time when Obama was finishing up his undergraduate studies at Columbia University). Obama’s mother’s family were of modest means, yet he was raised with the confidence and discipline to qualify, attend and succeed at top “elite” schools in the land (the only reason why he is close to winning the presidency).
Can you imagine Obama (a black candidate) with Shara Palin’s educational qualifications? No way, Jose!
So Obama is really the creation of our collective imagination. He represents what is inherently good about America. Like Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King is from recent history, so we all know about his dream and the new historical and healing chapter the Obama presidency represents for America.
But who is Lincoln? According to Wikipedia: “Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865), the sixteenth President of the United States, successfully led his country through its greatest internal crisis, the American Civil War, only to be assassinated as the war was coming to an end.[1] Before becoming the first Republican elected to the Presidency, Lincoln was a lawyer, an Illinois state legislator, a member of the United States House of Representatives, and an unsuccessful candidate for election to the Senate.
As an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery in the United States, Lincoln won the Republican Party nomination in 1860 and was elected president later that year. During his time in office, he contributed to the effort to preserve the United States by leading the defeat of the secessionist Confederate States of America in the American Civil War. He introduced measures that resulted in the abolition of slavery, issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and promoting the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which passed Congress before Lincoln’s death and was ratified by the states later in 1865.”
Anyways, coming back to the original point, what would Obama represent on November 5th on the global st