Unite, Inspire, Transform: Why We Support Barack Obama

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Sharon Kyle and Dick Price

America needs a Democrat in the White House who can transform our country for years to come the way Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy once did. We believe Barack Obama can best unite, inspire, and transform America and here’s why.

Since the advent of Ronald Reagan’s “Smell the Coffee” Administration nearly three decades ago, through these last bitter days of George W. Bush’s dismal presidency, the Federal government has rested largely Republican hands, to America’s great detriment. For 20 of the past 28 years, a Republican has sat in the White House and until recently, Republicans also controlled Congress — where they still can and do blunt any real progress toward justice and equality with their invidious partisanship. Now, with Bush’s recent appointments, the increasingly ideological GOP controls the Supreme Court and with it much of the Federal judiciary.

The result is an America that is worse in nearly every way Democrats care about. We are a more divided nation — economically, politically, and racially — with a tiny minority of Americans now controlling the great bulk of the nation’s wealth and our black and brown brothers and sisters still largely denied an equal seat at the table nearly 40 years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

Greedy, short-sighted financial policies — most notably Reagan’s cynically laughable “trickle-down economics”—have driven respectable blue collar jobs that gave generations of Americans a foothold on the middle class overseas, replacing them with new jobs that come with paper hats and “fries with that order?” smiles....

Abroad, we have inflamed our enemies and dismayed, disheartened, and abandoned our friends, answering every call with more blustering militarism, more greed-driven exploitation, and more thinly veiled racist disregard for other cultures and philosophies, buttressed in Iraq with lie after lie after lie.

And, now, after the Republican Party’s decades-long war on good government and the responsibility for regulating the economy that goes with it, we teeter on the brink of an ugly recession that will likely hurt most those who can afford it least.