Obama for President

The next President of the United States will inherit a major economic crisis, a related and unhealthy national dependency upon foreign oil, an unresolved situation in Iraq that continues to siphon resources away from our fight against terrorism, and a dispirited public, 90 percent of which believes the country is going in the wrong direction.

BARACK OBAMA

We believe the person best-suited for handling those dauntingly difficult challenges is Sen. Barack Obama.

The strongest argument that can be made against him concerns his lack of experience: four years ago at this time, he was an Illinois State Senator. His background as an executive consists primarily of running his presidential campaign, and the last first-term U.S. Senator who became a viable candidate for the nation's highest office, the late Robert F. Kennedy, at least had the benefit of heading the Justice Department for four years before that.

But Mr. Obama's shortcomings in that area have to be weighed against both his strengths in others and the strengths and weaknesses of his opponent, Arizona Sen. John McCain. In that context, we believe he is clearly the better choice.

The Illinois Senator has evoked comparisons to Mr. Kennedy and his brother, President John Kennedy, for his ability to inspire young people and minorities. That sort of intangible quality matters, but charisma is not enough to ensure strong leadership under less-than-ideal conditions. If it were, Sarah Palin might be Mr. Obama's equal.

His keynote speech during the 2004 Democratic Convention marked him as a young man with a future, even before he was elected a U.S. Senator later that fall. But the seeds for his rise in his party were planted nearly two years earlier, when as a State Senator he took a firm position against a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

That was what gave him early traction against primary opponents led by Hillary Clinton and also including John Edwards and Joe Biden, all of whom had voted to authorize President Bush to invade Iraq. No matter how strongly they argued that they believed that Saddam Hussein had or was actively pursuing weapons of mass destruction, they could not shake the perception that they voted as they did because it was the politically prudent course to take at the time.

Senator McCain, on the other hand, voted to invade — and made strong arguments in support of the Bush Administration doing so — out of conviction that it was the right move. He has been proven wrong by history, and the damage done — to our reputation internationally, in the diversion of resources away from vanquishing Al Qaeda and capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, and in the thousands of American deaths and the tens of thousands of grievous injuries to our other military personnel, outweighs the credit Mr. McCain deserves for advocating the troop surge that has stabilized the level of violence in Iraq since early 2007.

Mr. McCain in the past has said that Vietnam reflected a failure of American will rather than a military defeat. That view is no doubt influenced by his own ordeal as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war for more than five years, but we believe it is the wrong lesson to take from that conflict.

Mr. Obama has acknowledged over the course of the campaign that a troop withdrawal cannot be done in haste and should be conducted with an eye to whether conditions require an adjustment in timetables. Mr. McCain, with his insistence that we disengage only when we can declare ourselves winners, presents the prospect of a prolonged stay there that makes the phrase "moral victory" sound like an oxymoron.

Iraq has slipped from the consciousness of many as the public has grown increasingly concerned about the economic woes heightened by the sub-prime mortgage crisis and its crushing impact on Wall Street and the banking community. Senator McCain has suffered most of the political fallout of belonging to the same party as the President who was supposed to be minding the store but whose late response to the crisis was painfully reminiscent of his administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina.

That does not make him an unwitting victim, however. Over the years, Mr. McCain has been among the leading champions in the Senate of deregulation of the banking industry, and it is the lifting of controls beginning with the end of the Clinton Administration and abetted by Mr. Bush's policies that enabled the unsound financial practices and rampant greed that have come crashing down on us.

We believe Senator Obama's plan to discontinue the Bush tax cuts for individuals making $250,000 or more is one of the necessary steps for getting the economy back on an even keel. Our current President's father once derided as "voodoo economics" his then-opponent Ronald Reagan's plan to significantly cut taxes while substantially increasing defense spending; his assessment has been borne out with a vengeance by the impact of the Bush Administration's policies.

Senator McCain has assailed Mr. Obama's tax plan, and his criticism has been the closest he has come to providing a real economic strategy. Yet he, too, in both 2001 and 2003, opposed as unwise policy the Bush tax cuts, contending that they were too heavily skewed toward the wealthiest individuals.

That was one instance in which Mr. McCain earned his reputation for being a maverick, bucking his party and/or its leader to stand up for what he believed was right. He had shown an admirable willingness to do so in other areas as well, including health care, immigration, and his stance against the torture of enemy prisoners.

That John McCain is largely a ghost of the past, however. In his current incarnation, the Arizona Senator has departed from his positions on those issues and others to curry favor with the hard-core base of the Republican Party. There is the suspicion that this was also what prompted him to choose Ms. Palin as his running mate, despite the lack of understanding of national and international affairs she has demonstrated on the rare occasions when she has submitted to in-depth interviews with the national media.

Amid the swirling political currents in this country, Presidents have generally governed with an eye toward the middle. George W. Bush's tenure represented a radical departure from that tendency, and reflected a rightward shift in the Republican Party that was so pronounced that it would have made many of President Richard Nixon's policies, both domestic and foreign, seem, in that favorite GOP attack phrase, "hopelessly liberal."

The Bush Administration's attempts to play to its base have been accompanied by a strong and disturbing strain of anti-intellectualism, one that extends from everyday political discourse to feeding suspicions about evolution and global warming. Mr. McCain is smarter than that, but he hasn't campaigned that way. In fact, one early signal of how much he was willing to set aside long-held beliefs came when he courted religious leaders like Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell whom he had denounced as "agents of intolerance" during his 2000 run for the Republican nomination.

One of the unanswered questions about Mr. Obama is why he continued to attend the church of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, given the radical and sometimes crackpot sentiments Mr. Wright expressed about America and its government. But the Illinois Senator showed something about his character with a candid, soul-searching speech about race in March after his association with Reverend Wright became a major issue during the primaries. It displayed a willingness to speak frankly about the issue which stands in glowing contrast to the initial failure of the McCain campaign to realize it was playing with fire when Ms. Palin's description of Mr. Obama as "palling around with terrorists" at campaign rallies provoked angry shouts of "kill him" and racial epithets. It took too long for Mr. McCain to step forward and say that such sentiments had no place in the campaign, and Ms. Palin, distinguishing some states as "pro-America" as opposed to others, still seems cheerfully, dangerously oblivious.

On the other hand, Senator Biden, while prone to the occasional verbal gaffe, demonstrated during the vice presidential debate a strong command of the issues. He is particularly well-grounded in foreign policy, and unlike Ms. Palin, seems prepared to step in and run the country if the need arises.

Senator Obama has shown a more-credible understanding than Mr. McCain that the state of our economy depends strongly on developing alternative energy sources and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. He makes a strong point that given the wide disparity between the oil we use and our domestic reserves, it is folly to believe that we can simply drill our way out of trouble, as Mr. McCain has advocated (another instance where he has reversed a past position).

It was significant that in accepting his party's nomination, Mr. McCain cited "union bosses" in the same breath as dishonest lobbyists and "crooked deals in the Pentagon." Even in the days when he didn't defer to the far right wing of his party, he was not kindly disposed towards organized labor.

Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has pledged to sign a bill making it easier for unions to organize. If elected, his policies should benefit workers not merely in the area of representation, but in undoing the severe damage the Bush Administration has done to workplace safety through its under-funding of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the shockingly light penalties that agency has imposed on employers for violations.

Senator McCain has served the nation well for more than four decades, risking his life and then enduring terrible treatment for an extended period while a prisoner of war. He was the candidate most deserving of his party's nomination, but his decision to drift with that party and in the process break with many of his past positions on key issues contributes to our sense that he is the wrong man to lead a nation that has become uneasy about its future.

Senator Obama has shown a remarkable steadiness during a dizzying climb to the point where he sits on the verge of making history as our first black President. There is no questioning his ambition, but it is compelling that, after being president of the Harvard Law Review, he opted against the kind of job that would have ensured he was on the fast track to professional success in favor of working as a community organizer in Chicago. That decision suggests that one reason he has been so successful in appealing to the idealism of his supporters is that he stands for something larger than himself.

His rise, and the discipline he has shown while in the crucible of national politics, are a testament to intelligence, good judgment and a temperament that may allow him to compensate for his lack of experience. We're more than willing to gamble on that in endorsing him.