Obama

I'm in a ranting at work mood again so I think I'll do little bits on the candidates. I'll start with the Democrats for a couple reasons:

a) I am a registered Democrat so I should care about them more (I don't but I should).
b) There's fewer of them.
c) Their followers and detractors seem more obsessed and idiotic than most of the republicans.

I'll start this off by confessing, I don't like Obama. I don't have a particular reason for it, I just find him to be very nondescript. By a quick perusal of the internet news I can tell you a few things about him.

He's black (sort of).
He goes to a mainly black megachurch that may or may not hate white people.
He's not a Muslim (probably).
He cares about issues more than infighting (but I couldn't find any because of all the infighting).
He pretty much always votes with the Democrats (when he votes).

Yeah that's about it. None of this is a particular reason to vote for him or against him. He's a charismatic public speaker, but that's about it. He's a generic Democrat with a good speaking voice. The whole bit about changing politics and being post-partisan would be a lot more believable if he'd actually done any of it while he was in the senate. None of this is particularly bad, it just means he's another typical Democrat lacking any distinguishing features.

Now to address his critics. First of all religion. There's more to a church than the pastor's political views so I refuse to hold that against him. Maybe he agrees with everything that's said but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one. Churches are a strange amalgamation of social, political, and theological organizations and it's a crass oversimplification to claim that a regular attendee has to agree with everything that's said there. And really, are we actually discussing that he might secretly be an Islamic extremist in disguise? I don't even know what else to say about that, it's almost the most absurd thing I have to talk about here. Almost. That prize goes to the people who think he's both a secret Islamic extremist AND a secret militant black Christian separatist. I'm pretty sure that's an either/or situation. Either that or he's got some heretofore unknown mastery of cognitive dissonance.

Now for race and/or gender. I won't say that race and gender aren't issues in this country (partly for fear that my ex will hunt me down and beat me over the head with books about race relations again). I'm one of those people (sometimes accused of being racist) that just doesn't care about race. I think we've gotten to a point where we can focus on poverty regardless of race and it'll sort itself out. But that's a rant for another day. Obama is black and the questions of "is he black enough?" or "will he get the black vote?" need to stop. If you're voting for him (or not voting for him) because he's black then you're an idiot. And a racist.

If you think he's the best candidate then vote for him, if you don't then don't. I'm personally not convinced, but by all means do try to convince me.