Obama receives endorsement in The New Yorker
"The Choice" published on Monday 13 October 2008
by: The New Yorker | Editorial (www.newyorker.com)
Excerpts from the article. Please visit The New Yorker for the complete text.
Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching - that's the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has - at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity - undermined the country and its ideals?
The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction.... Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.... McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination....
On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic Party's nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalized language of "reform," but only Obama has provided a convincing, rational, and fully developed vision.... Obama is committed to reforms that value not only the restoration of stability but also the protection of the vast majority of the population, which did not partake of the fruits of the binge years.... On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals.... Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the nation's reliance on fossil fuels....
President Bush's successor will inherit two wars and the realities of limited resources, flagging popular will, and the dwindling possibilities of what can be achieved by American power.... The years ahead will demand not only determination but also diplomacy, flexibility, patience, judiciousness, and intellectual engagement....
We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy.... At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader's name is Barack Obama.