Beyond Race, Gender, and “Experience”: The Real Reason To Vote For Obama

As Super Tuesday is upon us, the arguments over which prospective Democratic candidate should be chosen has grown steadily more heated here in the United States. Along with the candidates themselves engaging in pointed sound-byte rhetoric (all of which seems to come down to Hillary’s “experience”, and the massive parcel of baggage that said “experience” has earned her), citizens all across the country have also begun to dig in on each side of the contest. Predictably, much of the “reasoning” tossed around by the loudest and most adamant of the supporters on both sides is really nothing more than baseless emotional appeals and inflammatory muck. It is time we got past such nonsense and got down to the real two questions in this election: what are the meaningful differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and could either of them survive the general election to gain the chance to put their ideas into action?

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No Such Thing As False Hope

Just look at that crowd…  — Photo by roxannejomitchell’s photos, Creative Commons.I spent much of yesterday writing a carefully researched and documented essay comparing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, with the aim of demonstrating why the former was a better choice for President than the latter. As it sat this evening in not-quite-done mode on my laptop, my ten-year-old son crawled into my lap and asked me what I was working on. We talked a little about current politics, and the Presidential primaries, and somehow in the conversation it was mentioned that Senator Clinton had urged the citizens of this nation not to indulge in false hopes by voting for such an “inexperienced” candidate as Senator Obama. To which my son replied

There are no false hopes. We need all the hope we can get. We have been living in a cultural dark ages, and it’s time we crawled out of it.

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