Because it’s what all the grown-ups are doing. I mean, I don’t expect this to actually change anyone’s mind. This post will probably carry only slightly more weight than the average Washington Square News opinion piece (Just kidding, guys! You know I love you.). But I’m not just wanking here. We’ve gotten some complaints of bias recently, and the obvious response has always been, “Fuck yes, I’m biased! If I didn’t feel strongly about this election, I wouldn’t be writing about it.” But I think you need to be upfront about your biases, so let’s just put it out there: For president of the United States, I endorse…

Senator Barack Obama.

Shocking, I know.

This, by the way, isn’t the endorsement of the entire editorial board. I’m pretty sure most of them are dirty hippies, just like me, but I don’t claim to speak for the rest of the gang. For me, politics is personal, and so this is a personal endorsement.

My earliest memory of Barack Obama is probably the same one that a lot of you have–him speaking at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, which you can see in the above video. The content of the speech is pretty vanilla; like all convention speeches of the modern era, it’s just a frothy brew of the typical bullshit Sorkin-isms that we’ve all come to know and be thoroughly irritated by. But unlike John Kerry, who delivered these platitudes with all the conviction of Keanu Reeves trying to play Abraham Lincoln, Obama sounded like he actually meant them. While watching that speech, it was almost possible, for a moment, to believe that the words he was saying were actually important.

Maybe that’s why it was so easy for me to get frustrated by Obama later on. His Senate career ended up being relatively undistinguished, especially when it was compared to the impossible standard in my head. By and large, Obama voted the right way, but that wasn’t really enough. He never made an effort to stand up and show leadership in the Senate.

Just look at what happened during the 2006 Connecticut Senate election, when he showed only the feeblest support for grassroots upstart Ned Lamont (who I interned for) against Lieberman, that soulless old Nixonian ghoul. A joint stump event with Lamont, like the kind he had been doing for other Democratic candidates across the country, could have shored up support amongst the Democratic establishment. Instead, Lamont lost.

I was furious. And I still think it was one of the worst errors of Obama’s career. It was an example of his greatest flaw: the man is just not a fighter. He doesn’t have that temperament, and it’s why he hasn’t accomplished much as a Senator.

But his greatest flaw is also his greatest strength. His cool demeanor isn’t what we need in a legislator, but it’s exactly what we need in a presidential candidate and an executive. Obama is unapologetically progressive, but conservative by temperament, so that he can lay out his policy proposals in such a way that they sound completely reasonable to many moderate Republicans. He can build left-right coalitions in a way that a partisan pitbull like Howard Dean (who I supported in the 2004 presidential primary) can’t. He truly is a uniter.

You can see that in the way he runs his campaign. The Obama campaign may be the most effective and best-run campaigns of the modern era. Their ground team is truly extraordinary; while his opponents in both the primary and the general battled over the news cycle, Obama, Plouffe, Axelrod and co. diligently consolidated grassroots support in the most unexpected states. Just look at first real contest in the primary: when a biracial man won the white-as-ham-and-mayo-on-wonder-bread state of Iowa by a clear margin, it became obvious that something was up. This was a different kind of campaign; smarter and more agile than anyone had expected.

If running a campaign is the first test of a candidate’s executive ability, then Obama has passed by flying colors. His strategy hasn’t been particularly flashy or gimmicky–indeed, at first glance, it seemed like a relatively conventional Democratic campaign–but it’s become a well-oiled machine. And while the campaign has launched its share of attack ads, they have mostly been legitimate, substantive criticisms. Obama’s somehow managed to get a significant lead in the polls while treating American voters like adults and talking about issues. That in of itself is a historic event.

I don’t want to shorthand the McCain campaign, though: they’re a historic campaign too. I don’t think there’s ever been a major party nominee, not even Bush in 2004, with so much contempt for both the voters and the truth. Over the past few months, McCain has proven to be erratic, insubstantial and, most of all, practically Orwellian in his disregard for facts. His lies have been well-documented here, but in the past couple weeks, the campaign has hit a new low: they’re now engaging in vicious, divisive attacks that seem blatantly calculated to play to the fear and bigotry of the willfully ignorant. That’s all they have left now.

The best example of this dynamic was not an exchange between Obama and McCain, but a recent back-and-forth between the two VP candidates: Joe Biden and McCain’s Rovian cyborg, Sarah Palin.

Palin:

Palin also made a point of mentioning that she loved to visit the “pro-America” areas of the country, of which North Carolina is one. No word on which states she views as unpatriotic.

Biden:

Both of these campaigns are about what America has the potential to be. The McCain campaign is about bringing out the worst in us; the pettiness, the bigotry, the selfishness and the intellectual cowardice. The Obama campaign, for all its flaws, is about appealing to the best in us. When I look at Barack Obama and his campaign, I see the America I was raised to believe in–and sometimes I even catch myself starting to buy into all of that cloying nonsense from the 2004 convention speech again.

On November 4, we’re going to be confronted with a choice starker than we’ve had in many years: we’ll get to choose between the resentment-driven politics of Nixonland in their purest form, or the politics of an America that’s actually worth believing in.

Either way, we’re going to end up with the president we deserve.