The Whys of Endorsement

So, shocker of shockers, that pinnacle of the liberal elite media, The New Yorker, endorsed Barack Obama last week.

Like the Colin Powell endorsement, this comes as no surprise. But also like the Powell endorsement, its power resides not in the fact of the endorsement, but in the whys of the endorsement.


The New Yorker delivers 4,201 words on a scathing recap of the Bush presidency and a comprehensive and airtight analysis of where and how Obama is better suited, in policy, persona and image, to lead the country. They cover everything from energy policy to tax policy to foreign policy to integrity to temperament. They end with this:

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. 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.

If you have the patience to read 4,201 words in a row, it is well worth the time, available here.

So, now I will shock you all, and declare that I am endorsing Barack Obama for President of the United States. My reasons are available at the New Yorker website.