Photo Essay of the Day We Changed For the Better

The future is now.

The Realization

Two ongoing, exorbitantly priced wars; thousands of U.S. casualties. An economic collapse now crowning above the surface of the murky, fiscal depths. A $10,000,000,000,000 escalating national debt. The indefatiguable threat of Islamofascism. Iran's distemper, still pursuing nuclear capabilities. Russia champing at the bit to be a world player again, dusting off Cold War rhetoric and chest-thumping. A 6.5% unemployment rate as of this morning - the highest in 14 years. The unrealistic expectations of a country all-in on your streaming concepts of change and hope.

It must be a hell of a thing, that moment you realize the American people have accepted your application for employment. Congratulations! You've just been hired for the loneliest job in the world. In Thomas Jefferson's words: "The second office in the government is honorable and easy; the first is but a splendid misery."

Welcome to your two-month orientation program, Mr. Obama. Splendid, miserable work begins on January 20.

Hope

Just returned from Pennsylvania, and I can tell you that it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I was primarily stationed (they moved me around when issues came up) at a supersite that housed 3 districts. At the end of the night, over 70% of registered voters cast a ballot - not including absentee and provisional ballots. In one district, 510 out of 709 voters cast a ballot. Considering the fact that some of the no-shows were absentee, provisional, dead or relocated, that is truly amazing. Unbelievable turnout.

But the real story was the people I met. I'll never forget the woman who threw her arms at the sky in thanks that she lived to experience this moment, or the man who broke down because his parents did not. I'll never forget the man who told us that he participated in the freedom rides, and how much it meant to him that we were there to protect the right to vote that was so dear to him. I'll never forget the families - 2, 3 and 4 generations at a time, who voted together, no doubt some of them for the first time ever.

America changed yesterday. Wounds healed, hearts mended and a new hope was born. Everyone there could just feel it - an unspoken recognition of something bigger than the individual voters, volunteers and poll workers. Hope. Hope has been missing for a long time - longer than 8 years. There will be tough times ahead, but hope has returned. And from my experience today, hope will be the first step to helping this country once again meet its great potential.

Warm Apple Pie Endorses Barack Obama For President

(Length warning. Someone's getting maudlin and windy!)

Formerly, I was an insalubrious fatty. I puffed a pack of Parliaments each day, considered exercise my morning constitutional to the toilet for bladder relief and stuffed my pudgy face full of McGriddles (ah, McGriddles - you still haunt my dreams!). There is a telling photograph of my bespectacled visage from Thanksgiving 2005 with a thick film of gravy - yes, gravy - on the right lens of my glasses. I really got into my food. I used my whole grill.

I was pretty sorry. My longtime girlfriend and I had parted ways six months prior to the humiliating candid shot - "ode to gluttony." My skin was a bit ruddy. I couldn't get my motor going in the morning. I sleepwalked through a dead end job. My apartment was a mess, strewn with cigarette ash and empty pizza boxes. Generally, the zest for life so self-evident during my early and mid-twenties had eroded into the enervation of my thirtieth year. A sad state of affairs.

Simply put? I needed hope. I needed change - change I could believe in.

I wiped the gravy off my glasses and addressed the mirror, confronting an old reflection before its time. Then, I took the first step.

I put down the smokes and tried to extricate the psychosomatic yearning in the pit of my chest. It wasn't easy. I teetered back and forth, sneaking drags from enabling friends, sometimes a whole butt. Like Ben Stiller playing "Simple Jack," the cold turkey removal of nicotine-produced endorphins made me feel "actually retarded." It was a dreadful epoch - those first few months. The withdrawal from addiction was frightening. Could I stop smoking forever?

Change was scary.

I got off the couch and trudged towards the gym, lugging my hefty 215 pound blob of a body to the treadmill, to the weights. My stringy muscles could hardly muster the will to do any meaningful strength training. My initial visits were painful. It was excruciating early on and progress was small, measured in baby steps. I wanted to quit. But I didn't. I kept at it. I got stronger, slowly, then steadily. The results manifested themselves. My vigor returned.

Change was tough.

I said goodbye to my beloved food, my blocks of Cracker Barrel, Extra Sharp, my Wendy's Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers, my chicken and cheese quesadillas (what can I say - I like cheese). Instead, I filled my robust belly with boatloads of protein. Chicken. Fish. I broke company with Mayo. I made my peace with Ben & Jerry's "Chunky Monkey" and sent it on its way. But a funny thing happen while my taste buds held vigil: I felt better. I felt spry. I reclaimed my youth.

Change was necessary.

Today, I'm 180 pounds, haven't smoke a cigarette in over a year (not a drag), fallen madly in love and generally keep my wits about me in the restaurant. No f**king mayo. No thank you, sir. I've improved, but it took change - scary, tough, necessary change.

My point (look, it's pretty late and I'm spent. I'm also half-drunk. Blogging is hard!): I endorse Barack Obama for President of the United States, our shining paragon of freedom, but do so with reservations about the future of an Obama administration, with the understanding that the road to American wellness will be long and painstaking, but with the unflappable realization that Barack Obama is a necessary panacea for the viral policies of George W. Bush's disastrous two terms.

This country is an insalubrious fatty right now. Barack Obama can bring it back to fitness. John McCain cannot.

I'm out of gas and really don't feel like ragging on John McCain again. His campaign speaks volumes. His inability to stay on message or offer a cohesive vision of our economic destiny is just too telling. John McCain is too risky to lead. That's a funny realization.

Yes, like the rest of the blogging world except for the incorrigibly cynical and intellectually bankrupt, Sarah Palin didn't shift the political winds for me. But for a different reason than most. It wasn't her feckless efforts during her first interviews or her desultory presentation in front of the electorate. It wasn't even McCain's judgment in making the selection. For me, it's why he picked her - a straight, unabashed pander to the GOP base. That scares me more than the flimsy radical associations portrayed by the Republicans as surrounding Obama. For the first time in his political career, McCain played the partisan sycophant and tossed in with the far right. In appeasing the divisive component of the party, he forever coated his favorite word "Maverick" with thick irony. I would never take his campaign seriously again.

As for Obama, I go in believing, but with my eyes open. I like his energy policy. I like setting a hard deadline for energy independence in 10 years - a bold initiative rivaling Kennedy's race to the moon. I also like his health care plan. It's a hybrid between private insurance and the European model (yes . . . socialism! Woooooo.). We fatuously call this land the "shining city on the hill" until the remaining 42,000,000 of our fellow citizens can afford basic health care and, in turn, basic human dignity. And we'll quibble with taxes later on and reach a compromise.

Finally, I like what Obama represents to the global community, a signal that America will no longer play racial identity politics. He may become a galvanizing figure in this world always on the brink, embolden our allies to stand with us and fight evil, and cause our enemies to lose their stomach for battle. A beatific vision of course, but shouldn't we shoot for the stars and come up short, rather than admiring the distant twinkles of possibility from the wallow of our realities.

Hope - the fuzzy depiction the Republicans lambasted and disrobed throughout the campaign as shell promises. Tawdry goods. Valueless preacher hype. They never understood that hope fuels progress, creates ideas, sparks innovation. Hope is the thing of gut checks, when you're at rock bottom, no health care, no job, no prospects, a mountain of bills, not a pot to piss in, no way out. Fettered by hopelessness, that's your only spiritual leverage - the faint glimmer of hope. It's why you buy a lottery ticket. It's why you dream. McCain, Palin and the surrogates discredited it with every talking point. I firmly believe they will pay the price for their political atheism in less than 24 hours.

I hope Barack Obama wins. And that's enough to keep me going if he loses. Hope is real.

So that's it. You have my prediction for a metered Obama victory. Sorry about this stream of consciousness. On the old devil box, I'm watching Sarah Palin speak live from Elko, Nevada as she completes her campaign '08 gauntlet. Gosh, her crackling voice crawls into my debilitated brain like those slimy creatures Khan inserts into Chekhov's ear in Star Trek II. "I must obey . . . her incoherency . . . must write not good and dumb also."

One hell of an election though. The Potatoe will have reports from the field throughout the day, including live reports from polling districts in battleground states. We will be with you through the results of the election. Our country names a President in 24 hours (as long as Florida doesn't get unruly again). That's a hell of a thing.

Polls open in less than five hours on the East Coast. Good luck America. Let's keep it fair and civil. In the words of Jack Burton, "may the wings of liberty never shed a feather."

I leave you with Senator Obama's words from his October 22 rally in Richmond, Virginia. Click the link.

Screw it. I also leave you with this, Obama supporters:


One vote at a time. That's an election, guys. That's all it is.

Now . . . what are you going to do?

Inspiration: Barack Obama "Fired Up"

His critics pick away with substantive epithets like "seductive," "stylized" and "alluring." The word "eloquent" becomes a pejorative knock. They say "hope" is hollow. They perceive "change" to be illusory.

After eight dispiriting years - no style, no substance, no nothing - I can use a bit of inspiration, some soaring quixotic appeals, on the off-chance he can back them up. Obama peddles these lofty wares and I'm buying. Let's pray the goods are not second-rate.

From "The Club Of Disaffection" Into The Light

Jonathan Martin of Politico reports:

John Dowd, Cindy McCain's attorney, complained in a letter to New York Times editor Bill Keller earlier this month that the paper had scrutinized the GOP nominee's wife but not investigated matters surrounding Barack Obama including his youthful drug use."You have not tried to find Barack Obama's drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, Dreams of My Father," Dowd wrote in a two-page letter sent to Keller while the paper was reporting a piece about Cindy McCain.

The McCain campaign released the missive late Friday night in response to that story, to be published in the paper's Saturday edition. It's the first time anybody so closely associated with McCain has raised the issue. Continuing the campaign's drumbeat of criticism against the Times, Dowd wrote on October 1st that the paper was not covering the two candidates equally.

In addition to the reference to Obama's "drug dealer," Dowd notes that the Times also has not "interviewed his poor relatives in Kenya and determined why Barack Obama has not rescued them."

At age 33, Barack Obama took a year off after law school to pen Dreams of My Father, a personal memoir about his pedigree as son of a black African father and a white American mother. With stark openness, Obama concedes the underpinnings of a shiftless youth and experimentation with drugs:

"I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though . . ."

Obama couched his normal transience through teenage trial-and-error in terms of race and insecurity:

"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man . . . Except the highs hadn't been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory. I had discovered that it didn't make any difference whether you smoked reefer in the white classmate's sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you'd met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl. ... You might just be bored, or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection."

Obama also stated the leisurely use of drugs as an adolescent was a product of stereotypes (trying to be a "tough young man") and regretful ("The choices were misguided. A serious mistake").

When confronted about his erstwhile flirtation with drugs while campaigning for the United States Senate in 2003, Obama responded that it had been 20 years since his last dalliance with illegal substances.

McCain-Palin incessantly ask "who is Barack Obama?" Perhaps they should read books instead of removing them from libraries (sorry - I meant instead of generally hypothesizing with the public librarian about the potential responses to a fictitious mandate speculatively handed down to remove books for argument's sake. You know, just playing devil's advocate). Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope contain 403 and 375 pages respectively. That might be a good jumping-off point to get to know him.

Has there ever been a more vetted, battle-tested candidate in the history of elections than Barack Obama? After almost two years of the most insufferable campaigning, he continues to succeed.

And the remarkable thing is he is not a Teflon candidate: Everything they throw at him sticks. People just don't give a damn.