A Final Word On the Presidential Election

We're in the home stretch, and I think we're all ready for the election cycle to be over - John McCain and Barack Obama included. This will be my last post on the national race until Wednesday 5 November 2008 at earliest.

If you've read my blog for any length of time, you know that I've gone from being a McCain supporter to an Obama supporter - an Obamacon. I've put up enough posts and links, and now I'm going to let the arguments make themselves.

- Above all, America's Founding Fathers created a democracy of laws and not of men, where the branches of government checked each other, and where decisions were made based on reason and transparent debate. Which candidate - and which party - stand up more strongly for those values?

- To be successful, our next president will need to maintain coolness under fire, he'll need an ability to multitask critical in a chief executive, and a resistance to grandstanding in front of the media with lazy, easy answers. Who can we count on for this?

- The next president will have to work multilaterally with allies and trade partners to control the financial crisis, grow the economy and pressure rogues like North Korea, Iran and Venezuela. Who can we rely on to more quickly re-establish the moral imperative and global human rights reputation we've damaged these last eight years?

- The next president will have run a clean campaign. Any campaign that feels it has to lie and bully and scare and incite has given strong signs that its positions aren't the ones that Americans agree with.

- The next president should be one whose administration does not want to grow the government even further and damage both democracy and business competitiveness by forcing extremist views on our families and kids in the public sphere - in hospitals, research and science class.


I'm encouraged that after such an intense election cycle, American voters seem to finally be developing an effective B.S. detector - and we're discovering that we really don't have such radically different ideas of what the country needs. Vote on Tuesday, and remember that participation in democracy doesn't end at midnight on election.