Jan 28, 2008 15:24
Firstly, he's so charismatic and he's the first president who'll look good shirtless that we've had in a long time.
But other than that,
When it comes to the issues, I tend to agree more with the far left. I agree most with candidates like Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards the most. But I think that the biggest misconception that people have is that we ought to be choosing our president based mainly on his stands on "THE ISSUES." Of course I believe it's fair to examine a candidate's opinions regarding issues, but for the reason that it will give us a better idea of his character. Social skills, educational achievements, charisma, and personalty qualities are, in my opinion, far more important than a candidate's particular political beliefs.
In this country, we seem to conceptualize our president as "chief legislator." But that is really not the president's job. Constitutionally speaking, the president's responsibilities are to execute laws and policies that have been dictated by people, via our representatives in Congress. This is why we call him the preside-nt. Frankly, the details of Barack Obama's health care coverage is irrelevant to me; I don't really care how quickly he wants to withdraw our troops. And I think it's just swell that he wants to raise the FICA cap to solve the problems with social security. But that doesn't really matter. What matters is that he wants to solve the problems at all, sincerely... that he wants health coverage of some kind for everyone as an end goal. Because electing a president is not electing their policy. These lofty reforms have to be proposed by someone, make their treacherous, epochal journey through both houses of Congress and hold up to public scrutiny, Fox News, think tanks, and unforseen political turmoil to become law, just to see if they'll even work. They'll be changed around by committees, senators, representatives, lawyers, mistresses, lobbyists, China, God, and then the WTO.
It is up to our elected representatives to devise policy, cast the votes, and reform the system. We elect a president to administrate policy, not to necessarily to dictate it. And to create this change we do'nt need a president who'll "fight," or who'll denounce NAFTA, or tell us that we need a single-payer national health system. Of course we do, but with Dennis Kucinich that will not happen any sooner. We need a Barack -- err, President -- who has the charisma to win an election with a wide margin, with a real mandate, who will negotiate aggressively to achieve the best results. And someone whose campaign platform revolves around removing the obstacles to what should be the legislative process that will allow the Congress to pass reforms -- exactly like those that Mr. Obama proposes, or not -- that will put us on a long-term course to save the civilization.