Obama Has Been Winning Me Over

On a personal level I feel that Obama's message offers to the country is one that we have been anxious to hear. He is making it clear that his goal is to unite a divided country, and I feel that he is our best hope to achieve that extremely difficult task. He brings passion and youth to a country that sorely needs some energy and new blood injected into the public consciousness, and his heritage is one that will speak to almost any American about what made this country great, and to the promise that can make us great again.
On individual issues, I am impressed with Sen. Obama's prescience in 2003 when it came to the Iraq war. He was passionately opposed to an invasion. Many of the other candidates that will run in this election were not so prescient and our country has paid an enormous cost for their blunder.
There will be a lot of talk in the coming year about Sen. Obama's supposed inexperience. He has, after all, not even completed his first term in the US Senate. However, he has been in the State legislature in Illinois since 1996. This gives him more legislative experience than either Sen. Clinton or John Edwards. Also, he is a constitutional scholar, who up until he was elected to US senate, still taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago. This is a man, for a change, who knows something about the rule of law in this country, and that alone should cause voters to carefully consider Obama when they look at the other candidates. His knowledge of the constitution will be made even more important these last few years as the Bush administration faces an ever-growing chorus of criticism for thier unconstitutional tactics. Who best to explain these issues then a former professer of Constitutional law? His perspective will be extremely valuable on these issues.
Also, he, like all of the other Democratic candidates, is going to make a strong case for changing the country's direction when it comes to carbon emissions. Sen. Obama is making it clear that he takes the climate crisis seriously and will make reducing our dependence on foreign oil a centerpiece issue in his campaign. Whoever is best at tying our energy dependence to the war on terror and can push alternative energy as good for business and a boost to the future of the American economy by energizing a stagnant blue-collar workforce will win the hearts of democrats and independents.
Sen. Obama's talk of an "empathy deficit" in the country will hit home with many democrats. It is an umbrella phrase that covers economic injustice, education gaps, and inequality in race, sex, and sexuality. I think this is a phrase we will be hearing a lot of this year.
From listening to him closely the last few months, it sounds to me that he has a powerful platform in place to launch a successful campaign for president. The question becomes what will he do with that platform, and can he successfully communicate his ability to realistically put his platform into practice if he were to be elected.