Oregon Endorses Obama's New Politics

register guard...The dispiriting tone of the campaign echoes that of the past several election cycles, in which the voters’ divisions over small matters have been exploited for transitory gain, obscuring the need for clarity of purpose in confronting the many large challenges that face the nation. A weariness with wedge politics should lead Democrats to choose not just between two politicians, but between two styles of politics. Voters should grasp the opportunity to open a new chapter — a chapter with a fresh political vocabulary, elevated discourse and rekindled hopes.

Obama offers that opportunity, and Oregon Democrats should support him in the May 20 primary election.

Clinton has the misfortune of being inextricably associated with the politics of the past — a misfortune not entirely of her own making. Many Democrats, witnessing her stamina and poise in the campaign marathon leading from Iowa to Oregon, must find themselves thinking that they elected the wrong Clinton in 1992. Yet she cannot avoid a close association with her husband’s presidency and the waste of its potential through self-indulgence and scandal, flaws that helped deliver the White House to George W. Bush in 2000.

Clinton has a well-developed plan for health care reform, but if she sent it to Congress as president, her proposal surely would be examined through the lens of the failed plan she crafted in 1993. Clinton’s positions on issues of trade have evolved, but no one would forget that the North American Free Trade Agreement was a product of her husband’s administration.

Name any issue — from taxes to Cabinet appointments, from public lands management to defense — and the ghosts of the 1990s would be standing over Clinton’s shoulder.

These reverberations are amplified by Clinton’s own political reflexes, which lead her to perform political triangulations of the type that her husband perfected. Her 2003 vote to support the war in Iraq — the most consequential vote of Clinton’s Senate career — is the most prominent example. She was swept along at the time by the widespread belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, as well as by a calculated desire to look tough. Clinton now attempts to minimize the significance of her vote and will not acknowledge her small portion of responsibility for the war she helped launch. Democrats had a presidential nominee in 2004 who was both for and against the war, and it did not end well.

Obama is free of all that baggage, which liberates him to credibly promise to move the nation beyond the past 20 years of Bush and Clinton presidencies. His domestic policy proposals differ in many details from Clinton’s, but the biggest difference is that they would be received as representing not a reaction to the Bush administration or a continuation of the one before, but a real break with the past.
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Obama newspaper endorsements