How I decided, finally, to endorse Barack Obama

I make no apologies for it: I'm a Russ Feingold man. Feingold for President! I still believe he is the best person for the job, but he decided before the primary clusterfuck process began that he could do more good in the Senate. Another point in his favor -- he's too concerned with doing the most good he can for his constituents and the American people to gamble on the possibility of a promotion.

So with Feingold out and the contenders dropping like flies, I was left with two choices when I cast my ballot in the Massachusetts primary back in February: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Sure, other candidates were on the ballot, but even the ones who hadn't officially dropped out yet knew they were done. I was distinctly unimpressed with both Clinton and Obama -- I'm still not thrilled with either -- but I decided the responsible thing to do was to choose one of them.

And so I found myself voting for one of them, disgusted at a process that left me the choice of two candidates who seemed to me like rock stars -- lots of followers, both pretty good at what they do, but neither with anywhere near the substance to merit the seemingly blind hero-worship of their supporters. (I feel about the same about Clinton today as I did then, maybe a little worse. I do feel a little better about Obama, but still feel like we could have done better. Still, he'll make a great president.)

Why did I choose the one I chose? With the most obvious exception of their initial positions on the war in Iraq, there is little to distinguish the votes or policies of one from those of the other, regardless of what their followers say (and will no doubt protest ad nauseam in the comments), so I couldn't look to policy to make my choice. Did I think one was more likely to win than the other? No, as I've already said, I believed then as I believe now that only a blunder of a scope the current president commits every time he Deciders something would cost either one the election.

No, I decided based on one thing: the Fifty State Strategy.

I thought to myself, "Self, which candidate at the top of the ticket would do more to bring otherwise disinterested voters to support Democratic candidates for the House, Senate, and state and local races?" I knew that only a screw-up of Biblical proportions could cost the Democratic nominee the election in November, and I wanted our new Democratic president to have the largest possible majority in both houses of Congress, as well as more and better Democrats in power at every level of government all across the country. And I had seen the strength of the Fifty State Strategy in 2006, when Howard Dean's leadership helped us compete in and win campaigns in districts long thought to be immune to Democratic candidates. I wanted to see what gains the Fifty State Strategy could bring us with the aid of a presidential candidate with coattails.

After thinking about what I knew of the candidates' tones, their rhetoric, and their political histories, I decided on Obama. I voted for Obama because I believed that he would have longer coattails, because Clinton was a DLC member who believed in the failed "Flyover Strategy," relegating much of the country to the status of states that, to borrow some language from the Clinton campaign over the past few months, "don't matter." If I believed in the Fifty State Strategy, I had to believe that Obama would be the better candidate.

And yet I didn't really believe. Sure, I thought Obama was better than Clinton, but only marginally. And I was very turned off by the supporters of both candidates.

What turned me off most about Clinton's supporters was the promotion of the idea promulgated by Clinton herself that certain states "don't count." That bothered me at the time only because it was a clear, craven attack on the people of those states who preferred a candidate other than Clinton, and it was patently obvious that it was an attack launched for no other reason than that the voters supported another candidate. It was off-putting, offensive, and stupid. And though my state did "count" -- Hillary won Massachusetts -- my home state of Wisconsin did not because Obama won there.

But did anyone really think that if Obama was the nominee, that he wouldn't win Massachusetts? (Answer: only if they were particularly delusional.) And Wisconsin? It was pretty clear Hillary would struggle in Wisconsin, and there was a very good chance she'd lose my home state's ten electoral votes, but Obama would beat whoever the Republicans nominated. So anyone who dared think Wisconsin doesn't "count" was a fool. And the same could be said for other states as well.

What turned me off most about Obama's supporters, on the other hand, will sound very familiar to anyone who reads this. What turned me off about Obama's supporters was the whiny insistence that we should do away with superdelegates right now. See, at that time, Hillary held a huge lead in superdelegates, and even though Obama was well ahead in the race for pledged delegates, it looked like Hillary was still going to win the nomination on the strength of superdelegate support.

Personally, I agreed with the Obama supporters that the superdelegate system was anti-democratic, anti-Democratic (that is, contrary to the principles of our party), and anachronistic. I agreed it should be eliminated -- for 2012. See, the problem wasn't that they wanted to do away with superdelegates. The problem was that THEY WANTED TO CHANGE THE RULES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GAME, rules that all the candidates had agreed to abide by at the beginning of the process. It would have been as if my beloved Boston Red Sox, up three games to none and ahead by three runs in the eighth inning of game 4 of last year's World Series, had been declared the losers of the entire World Series when one of the Rockies hit a two-run homer -- it would have been changing the rules in the middle of the game, which is neither fair, nor democratic, nor Democratic. It's the kind of bush league tactic we've come to expect from, well, Bush. It's wrong and it ought to be beneath us.

But now that Obama is our nominee in all but mathematics, it is Hillary Clinton and her supporters who say we should change the rules in the middle of the game. They say that it doesn't matter that Hillary agreed to the rules, that states that moved up their primaries too early without explicity authorization from the DNC would be stripped of their delegations and would have no effect on the determination of our nominee.

Those were the rules, and Hillary had no problem with them when her nomination was "inevitable." But now that she cannot win without changing the rules in the middle of the game, and maybe not even then, that's exactly what they want to do.

The argument, they say, is that "every state counts," even though they've stated before that many don't. And what I've been seeing lately from the last few holdouts left here is something along the lines of "Hillary only went along with those rules because she didn't want to upset the voters of the other 48 states. She's really been against depriving the voters of Michigan and Florida of their say all along, she just didn't say anything until now."

Translation: she didn't have the courage to do what she thought was right because it would have been unpopular and might have hurt her politically.

So here's what I want to know:

Haven't we had enough of that over the past 7 1/2 years? Don't we deserve better than that from anyone who wants to be our president?

If it's gutlessness, well, we live in a dangerous world made more dangerous over the past 7 1/2 years by a president who thinks courage is shown by blowing shit up rather than implementing courageous solutions to serious problems, and that's not a trait I want in my president.

If it's craven, cynical politics as usual, well, we live in a world in which many of our biggest problems are left unsolved because our so-called leaders are too worried about losing their jobs to be bothered with doing their jobs, and that's not a trait I want in my president.

Yes, I know my endorsement will not mean much to anyone. I doubt my arguments here tonight will sway anyone's opinion. So what? It feels good to say it anyway: I endorse Barack Obama for President of the United States.

I'm still not thrilled with Obama as the nominee, but if he's shown me anything over the past three months, it's that he is willing to listen to what real people want and need, and he will be responsive when we push him to do better.

And he needs to do better, and we need to push him to do better. Can we do it?

(What the hell, in for a penny, in for a pound.)

YES WE CAN!