I'd like to urge fellow Hillary supporters to give their vote to Obama should he win

[ruggerson]

I keep seeing these posts from people who loathe Obama and say that they will never vote for him or they will vote Green or they will vote (god forbid) for John McCain.

I'm certainly not a big fan of Barack Obama.

I'm trying to find positive things about him, I actually like him at times, but I don't find that his words have aligned with his actions.

While I understand the "bottoms up" campaign as clever sloganeering, designed to appeal to people who desperately want to believe they will be part of some brand new democratic process if he takes office, it is, of course, just rhetoric.

I once asked in a thread how the presidency of Barack Obama will govern from a "bottoms up" perspective. By plebiscite? Of course, no Obama supporter was able to give a coherent response.

That is not their fault. There isn't one.

I do admire the fact that, in a purely political sense, he and his campaign cleverly smeared the Clintons as racists, got much of the media to buy the spin and had the foresight to run a fifty state operation, which left Hillary flat footed and unable to compete.

Politics is brutal and unfair. As it should be.

Obama has outgunned Hillary in many ways. It started in Iowa. He ran a grassroots campaign, effectively organized and thoughtfully strategized. She ran around the state doing large Town Meetings With Hillary and staged laughingly ill conceived events like the Hillacopter Tour.

And it continued. The gravest error of the campaign was the fact that she did not have a contingency plan, in the eventuality of a strong challenger. That they did not anticipate this speaks very poorly of her campaign. A campaign staffed by people that she chose. There is no excuse for the string of Obama victories after Super Tuesday. She simply did not anticipate events well and that is a strike against her. After all, we want a President who has foresight.

So, why support Obama in the fall?

Because we're Democrats and on every issue we care about he is better than John McCain.

He will get us out of Iraq, or will try to. McCain won't.

He will attempt to help middle and lower income Americans. McCain won't.

He will attempt to fix our public schools. McCain won't.

He will attempt to fund stem cell research. McCain claims he will, but won't.

He will attempt to restore constitutional protections. McCain won't.

And, most important of all, Barack Obama will nominate, hopefully, a couple of young Lani Guinieres' or Angela Davis' to the Supreme Court of the United States. A day I will find infinitely more satisfying than election day.

So, ok. I don't trust Barack Obama. I don't think he is who he says he is. I think he's an ambitious young, egotistical, self absorbed politician who has fraudulently reinvented himself as an idealistic hope and change agent, solely because he foresaw that the country was hungry to believe in that, as silly and ephemeral and empty as it may be.

But he foresaw it! That tells me a lot. That gives me the glimmer of substance that I can hold on to and hopefully you can too. Being a halfway decent President is only possibly if you are a halfway decent politician. The fact that he was able to foresee and gauge the mood of the country better than Hillary tells me that I can pull the lever for him, not with the hope that he would want me to have in mind. But with the knowledge that he is perhaps a skilled enough politician to achieve some of the substantive things we all want for this nation.

I've explained more than enough times why I don't believe in his message of bipartisanship or unity with the Republicans. Hopefully, this too will turn out to be a clever, cynical campaign ploy and he will end up being ruthless and tough and partisan and relentless.

He's been ruthless and tough and partisan and relentless as a candidate competing with Hillary.

That's enough reason to vote for him if he's our nominee.

That, and that alone, should give us all "hope."