Seven years into the Bush presidency, our country is in its most perilous condition since the later years of the Vietnam War and the Nixon Administration.  The litany of constitutional and moral failings of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches over the last seven years, and the media that enabled them, is chilling and exhausting to catalogue.  Yet it bears briefly repeating, to serve as a useful framework of the choice our country faces as we close in on November 4, 2008: 

• The original sin of the stolen 2000 Election.
• The quite-preventable terrorist attacks of 9/11 
• The dismissal of habeas corpus and the enactment of the Patriot Act by a Democratic-controlled Senate.
• The failure to capture bin Laden in Tora Bora.
• Guantamo.
• The cavalcade of WMD lies in the months leading up to the Iraq War Resolution.
• The use of those lies to bully Democrats into voting for said resolution in advance of the 2002 midterm elections, which they naturally lost, anyway.
• The illegal invasion, occupation, and sectarian partition of the nation of Iraq.
• Abu Ghraib.
• George Bush's 2004 presidential "re-election".
• Hurrican Katrina, and the abandonment of New Orleans.
• The 2006 Democratic Congressional takeover, which changed nothing.

This collection of crimes, negligence, and incompetence has broken the morale of the American people, and put the remaining citizens of the planet on notice that they are not to look to America for guidance, trust America to obey international law, nor assume their own sovereign borders are inviolate.  Our country has become a big, mean old miserable drunk, staggering through the bar after last call, flailing his arms about in hopes of landing a punch on his way out the door, but more likely to land on his face.

But to lay all of this at George W. Bush's feet is to betray the political history of the two-term administration that preceded his.  While the Clintons proved masterful political survivors of the 1990's, it is less than helpful for our nation’s pundit class to go on calling them masterful politicians.  Let us review the litany of political “accomplishments” of the Clinton White House:

• NAFTA
• Health Care "Reform"
• Doubling Down on the Drug War
• The 1994 GOP takeover of Congress
• Welfare "Reform"
• Telecommunications "Reform"
• Defense Of Marriage Act
• Iraq Liberation Act
• Monica Lewinsky
• Impeachment

The reason I list these is to show how the conversation changed in the 1990's.  The Democratic Party went from being the party of labor, minority rights, women and working people, to the party of big business, draconian criminal sentencing, deregulation, and triangulation.  The conversation shifted so far to the right that by the time a man named George W. appeared on the scene—a shockingly reactionary, fundamentalist, intellectually comatose tool of Big Business—he was actually able to run as a moderate Republican.

This is the legacy of the Clinton Years.  This is a legacy of eight years of wasted opportunity, leading to the inevitable collapse of the progressive movement, all while its supposed standard bearers—Bill and Hillary Clinton—escaped from the wreckage unscathed, with vast personal wealth and a Senate career to boot.  With only the delay of Bush's 2004 "re-election" to wait through—a fortuitous event for the couple, as it cleared the decks of any incumbent competitors—they had a Restoration awaiting them in 2008.

Perhaps the only good thing to come out the 2004 Election?  The rise of Barack Obama.

There is a different legacy of the 1980's and 90's than that of the slow degeneration of the Democratic Party, culminating in its corporatist rule by the Clintons and the DLC.  It is the legacy of a young, idealistic student who took his hard-earned Ivy League education not into the boardrooms of Walmart and corporate law, not into the halls of D.C. political power, but to the South Side streets of Chicago, to organize poor and disenfranchised neighborhoods, at an annual salary of $10,000.  While Hillary Clinton wrote her dissertation on the father of community organization, Saul Alinsky, Obama followed Alinsky's admonition to act on the ground in the community, rather than, say...write a dissertation about it.

From there, it was off to Harvard Law School, where he was to become the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.  What did he do once he graduated magna cum laude with his J.D.?  Off to the Rose Law Firm for $300 an hour?  No, he went back to Chicago, ran a voter registration drive, and became a civil rights attorney.  As the son of a lifelong civil rights attorney, I can assure my readers: no one does that for the money.  It is a selfless, financially thankless, exhausting work that one only does because the reward they seek is neither money, nor power.  The only reward is the knowledge that you have made a progressive difference in the lives of the oppressed.

Obama went on to become a professor of constitutional law, then an Illinois State Senator, and, of course, the freshman United States Senator from Illinois.  He accomplished much in both the Illinois and U.S. senate houses, ranging from ethics, police misconduct and death penalty reform in the state legislature, to nuclear non-proliferation, immigration reform, global warming and children’s health insurance legislation in his three short years in the U.S. Senate.  Unlike his current opponent for the nomination, he stood strong against the anti-working people Bankruptcy Act of 2005.  As regular readers of Today’s Lies know, Senator Clinton voted for this corporate piece of filth.

By far, however, the most important political step he has taken, up to announcing his run for president of the United States, is his early and forceful opposition to the war in Iraq.  In October 2002, amidst the jingoist fever that was this country’s run-up to the Iraq War Resolution, Illinois State Senator Obama gave a speech stating the following:

I don't oppose all wars.  What I am opposed to is a dumb war.  What I am opposed to is a rash war.  What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That's what I'm opposed to.  A dumb war.  A rash war.  A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

This unknown state senator with a funny name got what the President, the Congress, even a majority of the American people at the time did not: that this was going to be a “dumb war”.  He got what Senators Edwards, Kerry, and Clinton did not.  It was a war that was going to fail, because it was based on lies, not necessity; abstract ideology, not self-defense.  It was a war that was going to destroy our standing in the international community, alienate the Muslim world just as we needed it most, and drain our military to such a breaking point that were we to be attacked again, we would not have the resources to fight back.  The Iraq War a “dumb war”?  It is the definition.

These three elements—a streetwise background as a community activist, a highly progressive, idealistic and meteoric political career, and the right judgment on Iraq, the defining moral issue of our time—would all be, in any election year, more than enough reasons for the progressive movement to get behind Barack Obama for President.  But there is more to this candidacy. 

The senator has done something rarely achieved on the national stage: he has found a way to run as the centrist candidate in the race, while at the same time remaining the most progressive.  Not a day goes by without hearing from Republicans and independents that they, too, will be voting for Obama in the general election.  This biracial son of a Kenyan and a Kansan has achieved this all while remaining pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-labor, anti-death penalty, and anti-war.  As Iowa and New Hampshire showed, startling numbers of independents and former Republicans are flocking to his candidacy.  He is clearly the strongest candidate progressives could put forward in the general election, and we won’t have lost an inch on policy having done it.

Hillary Clinton has achieved the direct opposite.  Despite high-profile moves to the center-right during her Senate career—be it on the Iraq War, free trade, the bankruptcy bill, Iran—she has only continued to earn even more scorn among Republican and independent voters.  A recent Zogby poll provided this startling statistic: 50% of likely voters would never, ever vote for Hillary Clinton in a general election.  That number is a chilling reminder that many American citizens have anti-Hillary feelings that go beyond policy differences.  They simply do not like her, and have been waiting for the chance to vote against her for 16 years.

Arguably the least, and, paradoxically, most substantive part of Obama’s political biography is the obvious: he is the first viable African-American candidate in our nation’s history.  That’s our nation’s history—perhaps the ugliest with regards to race in all of human events.  At this moment our country is morally crippled.  We have been given in Barack Obama’s candidacy the rarest of opportunities: to show ourselves, and the world, that we want to change the trajectory of our history. 

The image of our country as the mean, old, power-drunk bully would be shattered if we could have the courage to confront our racist past, and imperial present, by electing a progressive, youthful, African-American internationalist who opposed our Iraq misadventure from the very beginning.  The fact that he is the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother, was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, schooled in Harvard, made his bones on the streets of Chicago, and scrapped his way to the U.S. Senate, is the most American story in American life today.  It is the story of what America is supposed to be.  If we could show the world this face—literally, this face—we might just have a chance at redeeming ourselves in its eyes. 

One thing is for sure: this is not a time for incremental "competence".  This is not a time for "turning back the clock" to the nominal tranquility of the 1990's.  That is simply not going to happen.  In my opinion, that kind of thinking is how we got into this mess in the first place.  This is a time for revolutionary change.  Barack Obama is not just the best Presidential candidate for our time.  He is the only candidate.  I sincerely hope you agree.  Please vote on Tuesday.