Why I'm voting for Obama

I was in New York City recently, coinciding with the September Obama rally at Washington Square Park. About 25,000 people jammed the square. I came away all warm and fuzzy, with a $20 t-shirt that looks a bit like this, and a similar rally sign which I sent to a New Yorker friend of mine. I went because I'm voting for Barack Obama, and so should you.

I used to be a Hillary supporter. Anything to get her husband back in the building - that was largely the rationale. I'm also an idea guy, and there aren't many ideas bigger than having a woman president. Then Obama started running, and all I needed to see from him was a mere sniff of viability to change my mind. Here's why.

I am sick and tired of American politics being dominated by a grudge match between the opposite sides of the 1960's. You can see the two sides huddled in dorm rooms across the hall from each other sometime around 1968. Room 101 has a bunch of privileged blue bloods wishing they were Barry Goldwater, counting the communists in their midst, reading the Bible and listening to Pat Boone. Room 102 across the hall is filled with long-haired freaky people blaring the Beatles from the stereo, everyone high and having sex, burning draft cards in their bongs.

Stereotypical caricature? You bet. Too bad our politics today far more resembles this caricature than the reality. It's all our discourse has become. And every candidate, both Republican and Democrat, except for Barack, is fighting this battle in every word they utter. Some more than others, true. But every policy position every candidate takes is either meant to win the argument back in the dorm room in 1968, or somehow make themselves look less like the caricature the other side has painted for 40 years.

It's polarized our politics so badly that one side can't accept when the other is right, or when their side is wrong. That communism really was bad, that gay people really are humans, that military force is sometimes necessary, or that some things like abortion are best left private. We have spent the entire political breath of our nation for most of the last two decades literally arguing over genitals, and when not literally, figuratively comparing the size of them to see who's tougher.

It pains me to say it, but if Hillary Clinton becomes president, as much as I would support her during the campaign and her presidency, this absurd battle between the dorm rooms of the 1960's would not only continue, but accelerate, amplify, and keep America frozen in time. We can no longer afford the gluttonous luxury of perpetually examining our own navels. I will support Hillary if she is the nominee, but not because of any need for change, but because I'm a Democrat. She's not the change we need.

Barack Obama is. He represents change just by being who he is. All this talk about experience, DC or otherwise, misses the point. Obama is neither a product of, nor a combatant in, this completely counterproductive battle of the 1960's dorm rooms. That's plenty for me. The fact that he's African American just embodies the point even more. Oprah said in her speech in South Carolina that it was "some kind of amazing grace" that she was in SC, the cradle of racial division in America, introducing this man, to be president of this country. That's a battle worth fighting, and victory over that division is worth far more for our country, for all of us, than anything the 1960's paradigm might produce.

Go Barack, go. You might not win, and if you do, you might disappoint. It won't matter to me, because at least our politics will have finally turned a corner.