Why I'm Supporting Barack Obama

Everyone and their dog keeps crowing about Barack Obama's lack of accomplishments, so I thought I'd put this little list together.

Barack Obama Accomplishment List:

• First African-American President of the Harvard Law Review
• Practiced as a Civil Rights Attorney in private life
  
• Taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School
  
• 8 Years in the Illinois State Senate
• Created the Earned Income Tax Credit in the State of Illinois providing an enormous tax cut to working families
• Spearheaded the legislation necessary for the expansion of Early Childhood Education in the State of Illinois
• Worked with law enforcement and legislators to pass measures requiring that all interrogations and confessions be videotaped in capital cases
• Has done extensive charity work based around community empowerment
• Currently advocates for US involvement in ending the genocide in Darfur
  
• Married to a Harvard graduate who has spent several years running a non-profit leadership training program
• Opposed the illegal and immoral Iraq War!
  

While I acknowledge that Hillary Clinton may have more "experience" in terms of dealing with Washington, my question is, do we really want someone like that in Washington? We are standing at the crossroads where the next five years is going to matter greatly. There are economic, environmental, food supply, foreign, and infrastructure challenges that will require a staunch individual to stand up to very monied special interests. This individual will have to rally members of the government, who have been bought off and propped up by those special interests, to do the right thing for America. At this point, I don't think Hillary can do that, because she is part of that "purchased for the highest dollar" establishment.

Barack Obama stood in a room full of Detroit auto workers and told them they had to make more fuel efficient cars. The room went silent. He stood in a room in Texas and spoke out against racism, and the room went silent. Any other politician would have been crapping themselves had they said something that made a room of people go uncomfortably silent, and would have been scrambling to make an apology, but Obama didn't. He actually stood by what he said, and that speaks louder than any of the accomplishments listed above.

Barack Obama is the only candidate who doesn't tell us what we want to hear, but what we have to hear. He also hasn't had a problem telling us that we are all going to have to make sacrifices in order to put our country back in order. Nobody wants to have to sacrifice, but deep down we know we've all fucked things up, and now we've got to bite the bullet and go clean up our room.

I doubt that a law professor who lives in Chicago, grew up in Hawaii, and is a fan of R&B has that much inkling into the punk movement, but anyone who is willing to tell a Texas redneck that there's no excuse for his racism, is punk enough for me.