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Gobama

May 9, 2008

I should admit that I'm pretty excited about Barack Obama being the almost-guaranteed Democratic nominee. I was dreading another Clinton in the Oval Office. Provided Obama doesn't do anything insane (and he's been my Senator for the last 4 years so I doubt it) I'll be voting for him for President in November. Some of my reasons are:

1) He says he'll end the war in Iraq. I opposed going into Iraq in the first place. If I knew it would cost more and last longer than the administration claimed at the time, there is no way they did not know. I also didn't believe in the WMDs, so I didn't see any reason to engage in costly nation-building. For a while after the war started I maintained that we needed to stay. "You break it, you buy it" after all. However, at this point I believe we're doing more harm than good, both to our military and the people of Iraq. We've failed to stop sectarian violence. We've failed to protect vital infrastructure. The political forces of Iraq are using our military to attack their enemies. I can't see any good that will come from our remaining in the country and if we get out we'll keep our troops safe and save billions of dollars. We need to get out now. Meanwhile he's going to redirect our efforts in Afghanistan so we can finally catch the people responsible for 9/11.

2) He isn't beholden to special interests. Obama has more individual donors to his campaign than any campaign in history. This means that he doesn't have to worry about keeping a particular group happy in order to keep his campaign money flowing. Hopefully, this means he'll be making decisions based on what's best for everyone, not just the groups who donated to his campaign.

3) Obama seems to understand economics. He realized that a gas tax holiday was a terrible idea. He supports free trade, but at the same time recognizes that it isn't fair if other countries are allowed to disregard labor protections and environmental controls. The one outlier here is his support of agricultural subsidies. Those are one of the dumbest and most damaging of government policies, so I wish he would not support them.

I voted for John McCain in 2000 (yes, I wrote him in on the ballot), however 8 years later I can't support him any more. In the last year he's turned his back on a number of positions that I respected him for. For example, he recently expressed support for the Bush tax cuts, which he voted against twice. These are contributing to inflation and our huge deficit. He also voted to allow torture in the form of waterboarding, which he previously opposed. The government should never torture anyone. There's no excuse for it since it is ineffective in gathering accurate information and makes us evil. Finally, he's been publically supportive of religious bigots that he used to call "agents of intolerance." I really can't support that. Finally, he has no intention of ending our involvement in the war in Iraq, which is my #1 issue this election cycle. I'm actually disappointed. I really liked McCain in 2000 but he doesn't seem like the same person any more.