Thursday, February 28, 2008

The Phoenix endorses Obama

The Boston Phoenix endorsed Obama prior to the Massachusetts primary, and the Providence Phoenix carries the endorsement in this week's paper. Here's an excerpt:

Obama’s candidacy is not only about hope, not only about change. Most important of all, it is about the future.

Almost four years ago in Boston, Obama, then an Illinois state senator, electrified and inspired the Democratic convention as no national newcomer had done since 1948, when Hubert Humphrey championed the cause of civil rights.

Obama’s clarion call has been to reject the politics of confrontation and division as practiced by Bush, right-wingers, and talk-radio motor mouths.

His vision is of comity and common purpose. Eloquence is his calling card. It is penetrating, transcending verbal facility — the hallmark of someone at peace with himself, someone who is comfortable inside his own skin, someone who is confident rather than cocksure. Obama is also a maverick. There is no doubt that his promise outstrips his experience. That was also true of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Vision was their strength; rhetoric was their means to an end.

Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Wilson so successfully captured the spirit of their times — synthesizing the best, marginalizing the worst — that history remembers them as representative leaders: presidents who made a difference. The Phoenix believes that Obama has the capacity to do so, too, in a way that Clinton — for all that is admirable about her — does not.

2008 presidential race | Democrats | Media