It's time for presidential endorsements. Candidates are piling them up, and I'm sure they've all been waiting, hoping to win my support. Better than Blagojevich, better than Weiner, better than that congressperson from Florida who was propositioning pages, my endorsement has been known to sway entire families.
So here it is. I'm for President Obama.
The president has managed to get a health care bill through Congress and signed into law. It's by no means all we could have hoped for, no single payer, not even a public option, but still millions of people now can buy coverage who could not before. The insurance companies cannot refuse benefits because of a "pre-existing condition." Young people can remain on their parents' policies longer, so they can get a better start on their own careers without being hamstrung by huge premiums, a benefit of especial help to those young people trying to start their own businesses.
It seems ironic that the Republican opposition derides something that truly does help small business.
GOP candidates also take the law to task because it mandates private health insurance or a tax surcharge. That requirement doesn't bother me at all. After all, what alternative is there if we don't want people absconding on their medical bills, and don't want the public option?
We are moving away from our addiction to fossil fuels - once again not nearly as fast as might be hoped, but still we're no longer just kicking the oil can down the road. Solyndra notwithstanding, encouraging alternative energy production is the right thing to do. We will be a stronger more independent nation once we're no longer sucking petroleum from other countries. In addition, reducing the amount of coal we use will help preserve our landscapes and environment. President Obama will acquiesce in the Keystone pipeline fiasco, but politics is about making choices and the president has to choose to get re-elected if he hopes to do anything else.
The economy is growing, after the severe contraction a few years ago. We're on the verge of a boom, brought about in significant part by the auto bailout and "cash for clunkers" programs. Does anyone truly want to contemplate what would have happened if GM and Chrysler had gone out of business?
If things are no better, at least they aren't any worse, which they almost certainly would have been with President John McCain.
We've rid ourselves of the rigid "no child left behind" albatross. College loans are more readily available, and despite what Rick Santorum says, it's all to the good if more people are attending college.
In foreign policy, President Obama has ended the Iraq intervention and is winding down the Afghanistan imbroglio. America enjoys improved relations with most of the nations of the world. He acted boldly to kill Osama bin Laden and has resisted calls for an attack on Iran, while not bending on our position of no Iranian nuclear weapons.
President Obama has not yet laid out his ideas for the next four years, but I'd say that building on what has been done since January 2009 seems good to me. I trust this man's judgement more than any other president's in my adult lifetime.
The president has been civil and reasonable with people who are determined to be rude and unreasonable. The vituperation that his opponents have heaped on him would have staggered a lesser man, or infuriated him into responding in kind. The president has done neither.
The case for re-election shouldn't depend on the lack of quality among his potential challengers, but I can't resist calling the reader's attention to the Etch-a-Sketch candidate and Savonarola: Mitt Romney, whose core value is his desire to get elected and Rick Santorum, who would like to make America into sixteenth century Italy, complete with the Inquisition. Has there ever been a weaker, less appealing pair of presidential hopefuls?
I'll be voting happily for Barack Obama. I think you should too. The president deserves another term.
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