“When you pick up that ballot to vote, you will face the clearest choice of any time in a generation.”
*
“. . . the election four years ago wasn’t about me. It was about you. My fellow citizens, you were the change. You’re the reason there’s a little girl with a heart disorder in Phoenix who’ll get the surgery she needs because an insurance company can’t limit her coverage. You did that . . .
If you turn away now—if you turn away now, if you buy into the cynicism that the change we fought for isn’t possible, well, change will not happen . . .
I ask you tonight for your vote. If you reject the notion that this nation’s promise is reserved for the few, your voice must be heard in this election. . . . if you believe in a country where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules, then I need you to vote this November.”
*
Last night in Charlotte, confidently but with some humility and acknowledgment of shortcomings, President Barack Obama asked the American people for more time to continue the job, and we strongly agree he should be reelected.
His accomplishments—domestic and foreign, social and economic—are impressive, especially considering the implacable opposition of the Republicans in Congress, in state legislatures, and the Tea Party and conservative PACs and media around the nation. Despite his repeated efforts to work with them—despite his concessions in the stimulus and health care reform bills, for example—Republicans have spurned him and have given him maybe a total of three votes. He has kept his promises and he has kept his cool—almost a superhuman cool, in fact. He has earned our votes for another term. Did you know that under Obama’s presidency, even in these difficult economic conditions, more jobs have been created (4+ million) than during the previous president’s entire eight years?
And, this has to be said, the alternative is too horrifying to contemplate, but the more you think about it, the more seriously we should take the prospect of a Romney-Ryan administration: a recipe for disaster of every description, social and economic and diplomatic; backward thinking; callous disregard of the middle class and the poor; attention only to the needs of the already wealthy and powerful. (Do we really want an administration whose campaign pollster says, at an RNC breakfast sponsored by ABC News and Yahoo News, “We’re not going let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers”?)
Although this blog has sometimes been critical of President Obama—not so much for having the wrong policies but for not pushing hard enough for his good policies—we enthusiastically urge our readers and everyone else, too, not only to vote for Obama-Biden 2012 but to actively work for their reelection. As in 2004 and 2008, we will be joining volunteers en route to get out the vote in Pennsylvania, a state whose urban voters are likely to be disenfranchised in large numbers by restrictive new legislation making it more difficult to vote, thanks to a Republican-controlled state legislature and a Republican governor.
Please sign up with Obama-Biden today, or contact your local Democratic Party headquarters, and help with the campaign. You can make phone calls from home, help to contact voters in swing states, write letters to the editors of your local papers, and more! Two months. Let’s keep the good man on the job.
*
Also, check out Daily Kos’s “Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: A passionate defense of one term, a vision forward for a second one” for a sampling of newspapers’ responses around the U.S.A.
*
