Published: October 25, 2004
Editorial
Barack Obama more than star; he's best choice for senator
All you ever need to know about Barack Obama you learned in the primary.
Obama, a state senator from Chicago, was the underdog in the race for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. To distinguish himself in a crowded field, he might have been tempted to get off-message to get in the headlines. He still focused on the issues.
That integrity is why we endorse him over Republican Alan Keyes.
IN AN INTERVIEW last month with the Editorial Board, Obama said he has a relatively calm temperament. Good thing, because Keyes has baited Obama plenty, saying he holds the slaveholder's position on abortion. He called him a hard-core Marxist.
Keyes is a master of hand-to-hand rhetorical combat. But in the interpersonal arena, where the most important battles for legislation are waged, Obama is the master.
A civil rights attorney and law professor at the University of Chicago, Obama calls himself open, accessible and pragmatic. His colleagues in the Illinois Senate would agree. He made progress on issues that had been intractable: campaign finance reform and the mandatory videotaping of interrogations and confessions in death-penalty cases.
He follows his principles. He opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. Now, however, he says an immediate pull-out would be a diplomatic and human disaster and would trigger a collapse of Iraq. He favors maintaining a strong military presence to ensure free and fair elections next year. He also believes in persuading other countries that they have a stake in preventing failure.
Yet, as he said in a speech this summer to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, multilateralism isn't an end in itself. Cooperation shouldn't be pursued for cooperation's sake.
"It is in our national interest to work with others to accomplish national goals," he said. It sure is.
On the economy, Obama wants to deny tax breaks to companies that move jobs overseas. He wants to provide tax credits to companies that create jobs in the United States. He wants to enforce existing trade policies to ensure free trade.
IT'S TIME TO negotiate on behalf of our workers, he says, instead of on behalf of multinational corporations.
If those are the positions of a Marxist, there are plenty of people with outsourced jobs who would agree with him.
On health care, Obama wants to expand government health insurance programs to help the uninsured. Keyes believes that staying healthy through diet and exercise is key and that more people should use health savings accounts.
Four years of double-digit increases in health-care premiums call for Obama's more activist approach rather than Keyes' "don't let them eat cake."
On gun control, Obama's positions mirror those this newspaper supports -- background checks and a ban on assault weapons.
Keyes was a conservative Maryland political commentator when he was recruited by the Illinois GOP to run for the Senate. In his interview last week with the Editorial Board, Keyes mostly avoided the hot-button topics of abortion (which he opposes) and gay rights (which he detests). He spoke intelligently and well to the issues important to this region, including transportation.
But that is not the Alan Keyes the rest of Illinois knows.
THERE IS A REASON why polls show Barack Obama ahead by at least 40 points in this race. No doubt some of it is star power. His keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention has rocketed him from near-obscurity to national prominence.
Type the words "dynamic" and "Obama" into the Google search engine on the Internet and you'll get more than 5,700 hits; replace it with "charismatic" and you'll get more than 2,000 hits.
Serious challenges for Obama from both within his party and from the Republicans evaporated when scandals forced the candidates to drop out of the race. Obama admits it was a weird convergence of events that brought him to this place.
We're glad it did. We think he will make a superb U.S. senator, and he gets our endorsement.
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