Why I’ll be voting for Obama – again.

Here are the top five reasons (out of many) 5) He looks ‘presidential.’ I fear that may seem weird in some parts of the country (those shall not be named; you know who you are). More to the point I believe Obama looks like America looks. Or at least, the America I want to live in. As if he is not part of one race or another. (Side note here – use “ethnic background” instead of “race” – we are all of one race, human.) Wasn’t America founded on an idea that anyone could come here and make a life? Part of that is marrying and having children that look like a combination of parents. Obama is the living embodiment, among many I am sure, of that American ideal. 4) Other countries like him. It’s about time we had a leader that didn’t come across in other countries as a power hungry isolationist. It’s not, like the other side would have you believe, a weakness to show deference to other countries’ customs. It is called respect and since we seem to demand it, we should show some of it ourselves. I mean, we only have one Earth; if we don’t trade with these people, we have no idea what kind of electronics the Transfalmagorians might have. 3) Its the economy stupid. Sure it isn’t bouncing back like we would like (more on that in a bit), but if you recall this recession was of historic proportions (remember all those comparisons to the Great Depression?). Correspondingly, the recovery – if we want it to stick and be lasting – has to be much more thought out and steady. (To remind y’all, I lost my last job in ’09 and found a new one after a devastating seven months that saw my house foreclosed on and a bankruptcy filing; I know of what I’m talking about.) The problem with getting an economy back faster is that what is really at the heart of it is a desire to return to what we had before. And what we had before was an economy and society that was built on excess. (Thanks GWB for suggesting we go out and shop when you declared war on terrorists. And Iraq and Afghanistan.) It seems we’ve become a nation that marks the seasons by which games come out not which plays are being produced in town. 2) Women. Pure and simple. Obama has or had a grandmother, a mother, a mother-in-law, a wife and two daughters that have shaped him. Romney has six sons and a wife that never had to make the choice between cough medicine or clothes, between three meals a day and how to get her sons to public school. As a man that was raised by my mother, the idea that I should have any say in how women run their lives is inconceivable at best and offensive at worst. 1) Hope. It is not just a slogan. President Obama makes me want to believe again in what I think of as America’s greatest gift to the modern world: wholesale democracy. That we are all better when we lift each other up and help each other succeed. Last time I checked that was a Christian ideal. But the conservative right seems more interested in ‘what can I get for me? And how do I keep it?’ It seems a significant portion of American companies and people see the acquisition of wealth as the goal, not the reinvestment of that wealth in the very same machinations that achieved that wealth in the first place.