This is not an argumentative piece, intended to persuade. It's just why this one particular writer within this community supports Barack Obama for President, and has since 2006. I list my reasons in no particular order.
Barack was right about the most important issue of the last eight years: The Iraq War. In 2002, I watchedAmerica taken to war against another nation that was no threat to it based upon transparent lies. The American people were barely, and narrowly duped, but they were duped. Obama called it like it was. He was right. Many in our party got it right, but enough got it wrong that the Democratic Party truly was the appeaser party in 2002 and 2003, caving to Bush.view that Obama's criticism was meaningless is wrong. Had he been wrong, and the war been right, he'd be nobody today.
Barack's leadership style is listening, consensus building, and talking to all comers. When he went to law school, Harvard was about as hostile and divided ideologically as the nation later became. He became the President of the Law Review because its members (a politically turbocharged, generally brilliant group) saw him both as a progressive and someone who could fairly treat and honor the contributions of its many deeply conservative members. All groups left liking and admiring him. Bush's Solicitor General Paul Clement and RNC Chair Ken Mehlman were friends and admirers of Barack's. His legislative positions have not allowed him to show this intrinsically executive quality. But he has it in abundance, and we need it more now in our politics than we have in sixteen years.
Barack is a symbol of racial progress, and his election the biggest sign of racial progress in America since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There have been five black Senators in U.S. history. There is one now. Racial progress and the breaking of barriers is quintessentially Democratic. Seeing Barack win Iowa was incredible. Seeing him win the nomination more so. During the primary campaign, I had an exchange of mails with a close friend supporting Clinton who was touting to me the unwillingness of whites to vote for Obama on a racial basis as an indication of his candidate's greater electability. Please understand that this next comment is about those voters, and not Clinton. My son is half-Asian, my wife is Asian. And at the start of the campaign, I didn't want a nonwhite President out of family loyalty. My wife supported Edwards until mid-January 08, and seemed to like Hillary as much as Barack until then. But the 10% of Democratic voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania who admit voting against Barack because he is black voted against my son and my wife in a way that is very personal to me. We're going to make them very unhappy this November, and show themthat America is better and more decent than they are.
Barack is smart as hell, and cerebral. I am ceaselessly entertained by the plodding drones of limited vocabulary and intelligence, who can seldom spell what they post, but who question Barack's general intellect and call him an empty suit. So sorry, but the dude was top 7% in one of the most competitive, mostly blind-graded grad schools in the world. Harvard Law School magnacum laude graduatesare, as a group, the smartest and most capable people I have ever known. Barack Obama is brilliant, and he brings a cerebral style of engagement to discussions of difficult issues, and as some really great debates this spring showed (the S.C., L.A., Ohio, and Texas debates in particular), facile with complexity and nuance in issues like health care, environmental policy, and energy policy.I think wonk is highly overrated, but Barack does wonkeryfar better than he needs to lead us well and wisely. Barackis likable. I want a Democratic Reagan. I want a large majority. I think we'll win this year, but I feel better about the chance to win a larger victory later. Most of the great landslides in recent history (Johnson, Nixon, Reagan), were preceded by closer elections (two of those virtual ties). Our ability to govern as Democrats, to make a lasting imprint on the trajectory of America, depends on holding Congress and having a two-term President of some personal popularity. Barack is hard to hate. He's charming, a great speaker, tries to respect all sides in a debate. He has the temperament to lead us to a 55% or so victory in a second go-round.
Barack is a committed civil libertarian. He's committed to the Constitution. He taught constitutional law. But to him, the law wasn't a way to get the instant validation of a Supreme Court clerkship despite his rock star status leaving Harvard. He went to the streets and worked as an organizer. That is a man for whom the Constitution is a living document, not just as a matter of interpretation, but as a matter of a creed to be lived. People who sneer at his organizing experience or don't count it as relevant are foolish.
Barack will make the federal judiciary more Democratic, and more like America. Here's Obama on the criteria he will use to select judges: "The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old." The federal Courts of Appeal are approaching 70% Republican, and seven of the Supremes were appointed by Republicans. Barack has the judgment to pick great judges, and more diverse judges, and he's not afraid to say so up front, which shows principle.
8. Barack is authentic. Who you read as authentic depends on who you are, where you're from, how you form empathic bonds. It also depends upon whether you think someone's full of shit. Obama is as honest a major politician as I have seen in a long time. When asked in a debate about his decision to run for President, he acknowledged that there is vanity and pretension in anything like that. He isn't trying to hide behind a mask. The guy is who and what he is. For what it's worth, this was my number one explanation when asked in January 2007 as to why I supported Barack then.

9. Barack is my generation. I don't want to place undue emphasis on this. It's not a qualification. But in organizations of any type, new leadership can change things more decisively than Yuri Andropov staggering to the head of the line at the Kremlin. Barack is the Gorbachev to McCain's Andropov, and to the other apparatchiks who never made it that far. If you don't think things are fucked up in America today, you aren't paying attention. The bigger the change, the better. A young, untested guy with fewer commitments is more likely to deliver it than any incrementalist who thrives in the Senate.

10. Barack is a natural leader. True, Barack has a briefer record than most Presidential aspirants. But his lack of encumbering history makes him a better potential leader, not a worse one; there's less minutiae to get lost it, less gotcha to play, a more pure focus on the now and going forward. And leadership is not a wonk contest. I loved Dukakis, but I also noticed the gravity of his wonky Executive leadership, in great measure, is a function of vision, generality, and inspiration.Barack has the heft needed (more than any Republican President since at least Nixon) to do policy, but we aren't in a wonkery deficit, we're in a moral leadership and progressive leadership deficit. In him, I see the solution.

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