While Hillary Clinton won the pre primary (or caucus) endorsement prize in Iowa, Barack Obama has won the endorsement prize for the New Hampshire primary, from the Boston Globe. Obama, the Gobe says, “would be the country’s first post-Baby Boom president if elected” and they seemed to feel he “fulfills America’s need for “a president with an intuitive sense of the wider world.”” John McCain was their choice in the Republican field.
The Boston Globe’s endorsement of Obama cited his “extraordinary biography” as a key factor in their choice, noting “that he is the biracial son of a father from Kenya and a mother who had him at 18; that he was raised in the dynamic, multi-ethnic cultures of Hawaii and Indonesia; that he went from being president of the Harvard Law Review to the gritty and often thankless work of community organizing in Chicago.”
What is more extraordinary is how Obama seals each of these experiences to his politics. One of the lessons he took from organizing poor families in Chicago, he says, was “how much people felt locked out of their government,” even at the local level. That experience anchors his commitment to transparency and accountability in Washington.
Similarly, his exposure to foreign lands as a child and his own complex racial identity have made him at ease with diversity – of point of view as well as race or religion. “I’ve had to negotiate through different cultures my whole life,” he says. He speaks with clarity and directness, and he is also a listener, a lost art in our politics.
In the end, the Globe’s feeling was that “Obama’s story is the American story, a deeply affecting tale of possibility. People who vote for him vote their hopes. Even after seven desolating years, this country has not forgotten how to hope.”
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