'I support Barack Obama'

A number of prominent journalists, column writers and bloggers, have endorsed Barack Obama today.

The Des Moines Register may have chosen Hillary Clinton, but one of their more prominent columnists is supporting Obama:

Basu: Obama can heal divisions, win hearts and minds

I remember wishing Hillary Clinton would run. Not last January, when she announced, but before the 2004 election, when someone with her intellectual heft and stature was needed to stand up to the Bush/Rove/ Rumsfeld cabal and dismantle its agenda.

But Clinton didn't run then, and when she jumped into this year's race, days after Barack Obama, it was a different field and a different moment.

This moment belongs to Obama.

The White House is virtually imploding after four more years of bungling the war, the economy and domestic crises such as Hurricane Katrina. With the president's poll numbers in the 20s and Rove, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft on the run, this is the moment for a fresh start.

This newspaper has endorsed Clinton on the Democratic side. I respect its decision. But after sitting through most of the same candidate meetings, watching, reading, listening and searching my conscience, I've concluded Obama is the one who can best pull off what needs to happen.

Clinton is smart, hard-working, gutsy and tough enough to absorb all the muck that's come her way. But Obama is simply a better candidate. He's that rarest of leaders, combining roots in white Midwestern America with black Africa, and experience both organizing in barrios and editing the Harvard Law Review. He's got idealism, compassion and intellect. And he lacks the baggage Clinton comes with, including all the controversies that swirled around her husband's White House. Nor is he compromised, as she has been, by the Senate vote that got us into this quagmire in Iraq.

Clinton is likable - and polarizing. But Obama is a uniter whose very life experience promises a new chapter for America.

On major policy issues, there's more uniting this year's Democratic field than separating them. So the choice comes down to who can win, not just in electoral college votes, but in hearts and minds. Who can unite a divided public and excite people's sense of possibilities? That's where Obama leaves the rest of the pack behind.

Momentum is a hard thing to quantify. It almost has to be understood viscerally. I witnessed it in Hy-Vee Hall a couple of weeks ago, sandwiched between an unprecedented 18,000 people, all sharing a palpable sense of enthusiasm and hope. They were black, white, Latino, Asian, old, young, middle-aged and disabled.

Many had probably come to see Oprah. But when it was Obama's turn, he had them mesmerized. Some cheered and waved signs in the air. Some hugged one another, and some even got teary. It was as if no one could quite believe this youthful but commanding man, who spoke their language and echoed their dreams, might actually run America.

It was a long way from last February, when I first heard him speak and complained he was too cerebral. Betwen then and now, his manner has grown commanding, and presidential.

Some will say he's not seasoned enough, but one person's experience is another's baggage. Others in the field, notably Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, bring long Senate records But the country isn't hungry for Beltway insiders.

Obama has been in politics long enough to know how it works but not so long as to be compromised or cynical. He can relate to ordinary Americans. After all, as he told us, he and his wife are just four years out of credit-card debt, and she still shops at Target.

Bill Richardson, though endearing and correct on some issues, is vague on others.

John Edwards is compelling with his passionate anti-corporate rhetoric. Unchecked corporate influence is responsible for blocking everything from truly democratic elections to health-care reform. But Edwards' hard-hitting words are hard to square with his voting record, which has been wrong on so many issues, including the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind, and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China. How could he be trusted to make the right judgments when doing so is politically risky?

I've chastized Obama for his mistakes. But he is self-reflective and able to own up to them. He not only agrees to hear opposing viewpoints in making decisions but demands to.

While I long to see a woman or a person of color be president, neither gender nor race is criteria enough. The candidate has to be viable and stand for the right things.

With its harsh ideological agenda and unapologetic cronyism, this administration has torn through our surplus, our civil liberties and our international goodwill. Democrats four years ago squandered the opportunity to take back the White House by nominating someone who represented the same old stuff. What's needed is a candidate who represents this new America, and inspires pride in it as it grows more multicultural by the day, and as our fate becomes more linked to the rest of the world's, whether through trade, terrorism, immigration or global warming.

We can either embrace it or wrap ourselves in the fear and xenophobia some in the GOP are preaching.

Now is also the time to signal the world that America is not a monolithic dinosaur but dynamic and evolving, harnessing its diversity to enhance its strength. Obama could do that.

Bob Cesca of The Huffington Post and Bob Cesca's Goddamn Awesome Blog! GO! is also endorsing Obama.

I see in Senator Obama an historic character who fits within my persnickety and idealistic template for the presidency -- and this time around, it happens that my idealistic choice has a realistic chance to win. So this isn't necessarily an endorsement based on ideology, but an endorsement based on that which is required from an historical perspective.

The alternatives on either side of this campaign are ultimately redundant to what we have now.

On the Republican side, each frontrunner represents a rage-inducing aspect of the present Bush regime. The Romney Unit represents the Paris Hilton fiscal policy of Bush administration; Giuliani is the unstable, crazy-ass hubristic gunslinger; and Mike Huckabee is the cross-bearing fundamentalist who floats in the same fantasy world as Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort.

On the Democratic side, John Edwards is a tough call because he has the right idea. But there was a thing with Edwards from 2004 that I can't seem to shake. And I've really, really tried. During one of the primary debates, Howard Dean stood up to answer a question. As was the campaign fashion at the time, Dean rolled up his sleeves. Then, behind him, I spotted John Edwards whose eyes suddenly widened at Dean's sleeve-rolling as if to say, Oh crap, I should roll up my sleeves now or else I won't be awesome like Howard. Then he quickly rolled up his sleeves. It was an awkwardly candid moment which revealed a lack of originality and, for my admittedly nitpicky tastes, a little too much of the staged illusion of it all. But more importantly, I imagined him doing the same thing when voting with the president on Iraq.

Senator Clinton, meanwhile, is certainly more intelligent and centrist than President Bush, but there's a secretive, calculating DLC side to the senator which drifts too dangerously close to the universe of Dick Cheney than the fresh approach her husband, President Clinton, offered in 1992.

Speaking of which, President Clinton said this week that Senator Clinton would dispatch the first President Bush on a world tour in order to repair America's reputation abroad. First, 'the hell you say?! Second, wouldn't that be just like a Cheney -- to use a Bush as a political tool. Seriously, we can't have this. Not even as a speculative talking point. Not any more.

This is what we're desperately trying to escape, goddamn it. This is why it's imperative that Senator Obama win the nomination and ultimately the White House itself.

Bob Neer of the Blue Mass Group is also liking the Illinois senator:

Barack Obama is the best choice for President.

He speaks with reason and wisdom and walks with the energy of youth. He has succeeded in some of our most testing crucibles: our top universities, our poorest neighborhoods, and the rough politics of one of our largest states. His background, from nature to nurture, is living proof of the power of diversity.

...

Because Obama approaches problems, first, with reason, second, with practicality, and third, with empathy, he is able to find common ground where his rivals too often deepen differences. His positions on the war in Iraq, education, health care, energy, the environment, marriage, and a host of other issues offer enormous improvements on the status quo. More significantly for present purposes, they stand in sharp contrast, particularly on the subject of Iraq, to the deceptively nuanced positions of his chief rival Hillary Clinton (compare, for example, his actual plan for withdrawal from Iraq, with her, promise to make a plan for withdrawal.)

...

Finally, Obama has the decisive courage required to seize the day. From his decision to forsake the riches of corporate law to teach at the University of Chicago and organize in Chicago's poor communities, to his later rebound from an election defeat in 2000 to win the 2004 Illinois Democratic Senate primary by 29%, and the general election 70-29 (the largest electoral victory in Illinois history), to his present well-organized, well-funded headline-grabbing national campaign, Obama has displayed a remarkable ability to weave the warp and weft of his fortune with the bright colors of victory.

Reason, pragmatism, empathy, ability and decisive courage: Barack Obama is the best candidate for President.