Why I voted for Obama

Today I went to the White Settlement senior recreation center and, to the voice of a persistent old guy cajoling even older women to greater heights of calisthenics, I participated in early voting for the 2008 general election.

I voted for Barack Obama.

Obama inspires me and moves me like no politician in my adulthood. He appeals to the naive idealist in me. Moreover, I respect him -- intellectually and from his commitment to public service. I think he honestly cares about the country and wants to make it a better place. I trust his motives and his character.

Ironically, I supported John McCain in 2000 in the Republican primaries. I even joined his ill-fated Texas operation briefly. After watching his candidacy get torpedoed by Karl Rove's smear squad, it seems McCain has taken the position that he must adopt similar tactics to win office. He is no longer the man he was eight years ago, and sold his political soul to the RNC. That was made all too clear in his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate and his failure to control the RNC attack machine, which is intent on making this election about fear.

Palin is a hypocritical, judgmental, right-wing ideologue -- and as much of an anti-intellectual as you can get. Her selection was a pandering manuever to the far right of the Republican party, with a hope that she would attract disaffected Hilary Clinton "hockey mom" voters to McCain's ticket. Electing McCain is essentially voting in Palin as President, given the odds of McCain's surviving four (or eight, heaven help us) years in office. I cannot abide the far right's social conservatism, and neither can most moderate Americans.

It remains to be seen, however, how either candidate can really do anything substantially different, given America's current military and financial entanglements. Even if those crises were solved, payments on the federal debt, entitlements, and other minimum items offer little wiggle room for new programs -- let alone tax cuts.

Let's hope that whomever is elected has the guts to balance the budget and start America on the road to being debt-free.