Why I'm voting for Barack Obama

Tomorrow is voting day. Here are the reasons why I'll be filling in the oval for Barack Obama:

Obama is rational and clear-headed

Obama doesn't simply react, or fall back on old paradigms that he is comfortable with, but instead thinks problems through. A conservative lawyer who has worked with him back in his law school professor years says that he always wants to hear both sides of an argument before making up his mind. He asks searching questions to satisfy himself that he understands the argument, and then he picks the side that makes sense to him. We have seen this quality in him again and again during the past two years. He has been attacked and provoked many, many times, but he never loses his cool. When he opens his mouth, he has usually thought about what he is going to say.

A huge contrast with John McCain, whose modus operandi seems to be to work with two minutes of information gathering followed by a "decisive", seat-of-the-pants gamble, which he will then stick with, come hell or high water. See his selection of Sarah Palin as an example. See also his parachuting-in during the financial crisis between the presidential debates, for another example. With McCain, everything seems to be personal--- his angry outbursts have left behind a string of victims over the years. I'm a pretty conservative guy. McCain scares me.

Barack Obama is extremely competent.

Obama has shown an enormous capacity to learn new things over his life -- raised by a single mother of modest means in Hawaii, he studied hard and got into Harvard Law School, later to teach constitutional law, before taking up public office. He has also shown the ability to run a half-billion dollar campaign in fifty states over almost two years, beating even the Clinton machine in the primaries. The guy learns fast, and he can get things done.

McCain, in contrast, was the son of admirals who graduated toward the bottom of his class in military training, and married into money. A lot of his achievements seem to have been handed to him on a silver platter. While he has gotten bills passed in the senate, I have seen little evidence of outstanding competence. I don't have much confidence that he can get things done.

I want to tell my kids.

My children are not white, and I want to be able to tell them they can be anything they want to be in this country --- and mean it. If Obama wins, people's attitudes about what America stands for will change, both here and abroad.