Saturday, April 26, 2008

Robert Reich Endorses Obama

Robert Reich was President Clinton's Secretary of Labor and has been a longtime friend of the Clintons. He now teaches public policy at U.C. Berkeley and has a blog. In that blog, he recently announced his support for Barack Obama for president. Below is a clear and concise statement of his reasons for doing so.

I believe that Barack Obama should be elected President of the United States.

Although Hillary Clinton has offered solid and sensible policy proposals, Obama's strike me as even more so. His plans for reforming Social Security and health care have a better chance of succeeding. His approaches to the housing crisis and the failures of our financial markets are sounder than hers. His ideas for improving our public schools and confronting the problems of poverty and inequality are more coherent and compelling. He has put forward the more enlightened foreign policy and the more thoughtful plan for controlling global warming.

He also presents the best chance of creating a new politics in which citizens become active participants rather than cynical spectators. He has energized many who had given up on politics. He has engaged young people to an extent not seen in decades. He has spoken about the most difficult problems our society faces, such as race, without spinning or simplifying. He has rightly identified the armies of lawyers and lobbyists that have commandeered our democracy, and pointed the way toward taking it back.

Finally, he offers the best hope of transcending the boundaries of class, race, and nationality that have divided us. His life history exemplifies this, as do his writings and his record of public service. For these same reasons, he offers the best possibility of restoring America's moral authority in the world.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Finally, he offers the best hope of asuaging the projected guilt of Robert Reich's white racism.

Anonymous said...

I think he offers the best chance to raise your taxes, increase the size of government, diminish your liberty, surrender to our enemies, cause genocide in Iraq, make sure that Iran goes nuclear, nominate activist judges, ration healthcare, back the teacher's unions so the education system continues to deteriorate, force government mandated racial discrimination, bail out stupid or greedy people who bought houses they couldn't afford, and starve poor colored folks in the third world because of food shortages caused by biofuels as a result of climate change hysteria. So I'm all for him!

Steve said...

If he raises my taxes or yours and that money is used to pay for things like more accessible health care for more of us, better roads, safer bridges, better public services, and so forth, why is that necessarily a bad thing? If "bigger government" is needed to ensure that these things get done, why not have bigger government? What "liberties" do you fear that an Obama presidency would "diminish."? How would Obama "surrender to our enemies" or "make sure Iran goes nuclear"? How would he cause "genocide in Iraq," and how long must we remain there, how many American lives must we lose, and how much money must we spend there to keep this "genocide" from happening? Why would an Obama presidency lead to the "rationing" of healthcare? What do you mean by "activist judges," how do you know that they would be nominated must less approved, and what harm would they cause? Why do you have so much contempt for people who tried to achieve "the American dream" of owning a house of their own, and why do you have so little for lenders who took advantage of the financially undereducated and unqualified? What IS Obama's view of biofuels, and is the growing of them solely the result of "climate change hysteria," or is it also the result of attempts, misguided as I agree that they may be, to a very real dwindling of oil supplies just as more and more industrialized countries with huge populations are competing for those dwindling supplies and the price of oil is skyrocketing?