“Yes We Can” – Will.I.Am (Jesse Dylan, director)

Recording artist will.i.am and director Jesse Dylan, son of singer/icon Bob Dylan, got together with a group of musicians, actors and personalities over the course of two days to mold music written by the Black Eyed Peas founder to words from Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s New Hampshire “Yes We Can” speech into a song of hope, unity and inspiration. It is a video that sends chills down the spine of the jaded and brings tears to the eyes of cynics. Best of all, will.i.am, Dylan and friends did all of this unbidden. This video, and its making, is indicative of the inspiration Obama engenders.

Today is known throughout the country as “Super Tuesday.” Democrats, Republicans and Independents across 24 states will go to the polls to vote for the candidate they want to see as their party’s presidential nominee. The reasons any one person will cast their vote for a particular candidate are myriad, however, I would like to discuss a few of the reasons Barack Obama has inspired so many people and deserves your support.

Barack Obama can change the status quo

Washington is a mess. There’s no getting around it. Legislators are often unresponsive to their constituents’ desires, instead, preferring to grant the wishes of lobbyists and other big campaign donors; very little gets accomplished in Congress because of inter- and intra-party spats and rivalries; there is no unifying vision of where this country needs to go, and; even when there is unity of purpose and vision, there is someone in the White House determined to stand in the way. Today, when many people think of Washington, D.C., they think of a quagmire of lost hope.

Those who support Obama are tired of politics as usual and believe he brings a singular freshness. He is an African-American elected by a largely white, moderate to conservative majority in Illinois because he has a vision of what this country can be. He hasn’t been in and around Washington for decades adding to the morass on Capitol Hill, making it what it is. Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison captured the essence of Obama’s value to this country when she wrote in a letter to the senator, “[I]n addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don’t see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom.”

That wisdom was born, in part, because he is America–multiracial, multicultural and multiethnic–the beautiful quilt of this country’s lost amibition. As such, he brings a view that is more expansive and inclusive than we’ve seen before. It is a view that says we can be gracious and talk to those we don’t like (and who don’t like us) instead of pointing a gun at them first and that we must engage countries and people to bring about progress. According to Obama, “On challenges ranging from terrorism to disease, nuclear weapons to climate change, we cannot make progress unless we can draw on strong international support.” Yes we can.

Barack Obama can bring people together

Obama truly believes all people really are created equal and that blacks, browns, yellows and reds can work together to enable this country to reach its potential. In an election cycle that has been marred by racial code intended to inflame, it is time to see beyond the divisiveness of racial politics. That does not mean we should forget our heritage. Indeed, we must acknowledge and celebrate our different cultures, but not allow them to trap us into a mental, spiritual, intellectual OR gender ghetto that separates us from our common goals.

Much has been made of the notion that Latinos will not support Obama in California and the rest of the Southwest because there is a rivalry between blacks and browns. However, the people who have posited this theory forget the reality that Obama has been endorsed by the nation’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, La Opinion, saying:

Senator Barack Obama represents fundamental change in a campaign in which ‘change’ has become a central theme. Obama’s approach to immigration and his inspiring vision are what the country need to break through the current feeling of political malaise.

. . .

It is this commitment to the immigration issue which drove Obama to condemn the malicious lies made during the immigration debate, to understand the need for driver’s licenses, and to defend the rights of undocumented students by co-authoring the DREAM Act. The senator has demonstrated character by maintaining his position despite the hostile political climate.

. . .

We need a leader today that can inspire and unite America again around its greatest possibilities. Barack Obama is the right leader for the time.

The senator’s hometown Spanish-language newspaper, La Hoy, also endorsed him. This is the first time the Chicago newspaper has endorsed any presidential candidate. “The son of an immigrant father and an American mother, Obama knows the challenges facing those deprived of privileges, when facing the uphill climb to success. . . . The Senator is capable of compromising with those who think differently, and has the strength to renew the hopes of those who have come to this country in search of a better life. . . . We, the Latinos, are a mostly young population, with great dreams and hunger for success. For that reason we consider that Barack Obama is the Democratic Party’s best option, to give back to the country a national unity that includes Hispanic talent.”

As La Hoy mentioned, Obama not only brings people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds together, but also those of different ideologies. It is, perhaps, one of his most defining qualities. As he noted in his South Carolina victory speech, “[Obama supporters] are Democrats from Des Moines and independents from Concord and, yes, some Republicans from rural Nevada.” In the very speech from which the above video was made, he emphasizes the diversity of his coalition but says the thing they all have in common is they are people who, “are tired of the division and distraction that has clouded Washington, who know that we can disagree without being disagreeable, who understand that, if we mobilize our voices to challenge the money and influence that stood in our way and challenge ourselves to reach for something better, there is no problem we cannot solve, there is no destiny that we cannot fulfill.” We can be–we must be–a UNITED States of America. Yes we can.

Barack Obama can end the Iraq War

According to Antiwar.com, there have been 3945 U.S. casualties since the Iraq War began March 19, 2003; 3806 of those have come since President George W. Bush arrogantly and foolishly stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declared “Mission accomplished!” on May 1, 2003. In stark contrast to anyone else running for either party’s presidential nomination, Barack Obama has never supported the war.

At an anti-war rally held in Chicago on October 2, 2002, then-State Senator Barack Obama made the following remarks:

After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again. I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism.

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear – I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the middle east (sic), and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

I encourage reading entire speech here.

In the wee hours of October 11, 2002, Sen. Hillary Clinton, the other candidate for the Democratic party presidential nomination, in bold relief to Obama’s position, voted to send American troops into Iraq, thus beginning the Iraq War. Literally minutes prior to her vote authorizing the war, she voted against the Levin amendment to the authorization. The Levin amendment would have reigned the administration in and encouraged it to work with other nations before then coming back to Congress to ask for authorization. For a full discussion of the Levin amendment see my previous post “Obama Cordially Hangs Clinton on Iraq in Pre-Super Tuesday Debate.”

Obama has offered a plan to bring one or two brigades a month home from Iraq with full withdrawal completed within 16 months. Clinton will not commit to a timetable even though she says that she now favors ending the war.

Although Obama wants to end the Iraq War, he stated in the February 2, 2008 Los Angeles debate with Clinton, “I think it is important for us to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in. . . . but I do think it is important for us to set a date. And the reason I think it is important is because if we are going to send a signal to the Iraqis that we are serious, and prompt the Shia, the Sunni and the Kurds to actually come together and negotiate, they have to have clarity about how serious we are.” We must get out of Iraq as carefully as possible and as soon as possible. Yes We Can.

In Conclusion

For some candidates, this presidential campaign season began years ago. And, for some, it has ended too soon. I think we can all agree that parts of it have been extremely ugly, but there have also been times that have inspired hope where once there was none. Those latter times have, most often, been inspired by Barack Obama–a uniquely transformative agent of aspiration and change. He looks at this country and its people and sees what is possible with faith, belief in ourselves and a generous spirit. He rejects the politics of fear which turns into the politics of “mean.” As a result, people are valuable not because they are of a particular race, ethnicity, gender, income status or sexual orientation. They are valuable because they are human beings who deserve to be heard and counted.

Today is almost at an end. If you live in a Super Tuesday state and you have not voted yet, please do so. But, before you pull that lever or press a touchscreen or fill in a bubble, realize that today is a new day. It is a day when we have a chance to propose a man with the courage to dream, the belief that we can be better than we are and the audacity of hope. He did not sit in the Senate in Washington wringing his hands, wondering what he should do while we languished in malaise. Instead, on February 10, 2007, on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln once called on a divided nation to stand together, Sen. Barack Obama entered the race for president of the United States and asked us to stand together with him to change this country and the world. Some say that he should wait his turn, that he hasn’t paid his dues and that he doesn’t have the experience. They expect him to defer to others who, frankly, don’t have the vision or skills to be a unifying force to correct the mistakes made by the current administration. Instead, he saw that waiting would only allow the country to sink deeper into the abyss, making recovery that much harder. He understood what Martin Luther King, Jr. called in his “I Have A Dream” speech the “urgency of now.”

The reality is that the differences between Clinton and Obama are few. Nevertheless, they are significant. In my mind, perhaps the most astounding difference overall is that the latter can unite while the former has a disturbing tendency to divide and to do so in a profoundly ugly way. In this new day that is today, we need to put aside our racial, cultural, ethnic and gender politics in favor of moving this country forward in a healthy way that will restore our prestige throughout the world. It will take boldness, courage, imagination and brilliance. Barack Obama has those characteristics in abundance. He believes: Yes we can! ¡Sí se puede! I believe, with your vote today: Yes, we can win!

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