There was a column in Entertainment Weekly by Mark Harris about a speech Obama gave to some Hollywood types. It was about censorship and how we shouldn't, standard Dem stuff, lots of applause. But then Obama went on to say that Hollywood needed to start taking some responsibility for itself, that his girls shouldn't see commercials for Hostel VII during American Idol. And Harris said there was a lot of silence in the auditorium. This is very Obama, a belief in what government should and shouldn't do, and a believe in personal responsibility, and not in the code Reaganite way. He calls for people to meet him halfway, and this is unusual and one of the things I really respect about him. (This was the column writer's moment where he chose his candidate.)

I was an Edwards person. I believed he wanted to be president because he wanted to help poor people. And after the depredations of the last 8 years, that seemed to be the real moral task of the next administration.

Then Obama won Iowa, and I sensed, suddenly, that the world had changed. I had thought he was a DLC-er, a Clintonian, too eager to be a centrist, and a bit too religious for my tastes. But I watched his speech after Iowa and was moved--by the man and his words. And so I started to pay attention to him. I asked my friends who supported him why. Many had read his books when they came out and knew then that this man should be president. I looked at his positions and watched him on the trail and came to believe that he was the exact person we need at this moment in time. I thought he could change the country, fundamentally. And that he would crush the Republicans.

I knew during the 2004 speech that I wanted a President Obama someday. For anyone else who remembers the line, he had me at the word "Awesome." To me, that was the signal that I'd spotted a Democrat who could actively resist culture war divisions.

And yet, I dithered a bit about experience and electability and whether this was the right year. But on Martin Luther King's birthday, I realized that we were coming up on the 40th anniversary of Dr. King's death, and I realized who I wanted to have as the voice of the Democratic party for that event. In that moment, it wasn't about being sure about electability. It was about being sure who I wanted to fight for.

Only after that did I look into the organizational strength of the campaign and become quite sure that we're looking not only at electability but at the opportunity to realign the country for a generation.

Oh yeah, I should note that my reaction against Clinton wasn't as strong as I wrote here.
I guess you could say that my opinion after that point was "Clinton's policies are pretty good, as far as I know."
She was third after Richardson (I admit that I thought about electability when ruling out Edwards).

I knew generally what it was---I remember the schoolmarmish voice of senator clinton scolding Obama for being naive and inexperienced---I googled and this guy's account seems as good as any.

This scenario is once again running is course in Pakistan even as we speak. The Musharraf regime is on the brink of going the way of its predecessors. There is nothing new about this in the compass of Pakistan's past history. Like his predecessors, Musharraf is flailing about trying to retain his mandate by tampering with the country's judiciary, pursuing 'Great Game' stratagems in Waziristan, Afghanistan and Kashmir, and seeking ways either to rig the impending national elections or, if that fails, employing the gimmick of 'emergency rule' to prevent them from taking place.

The last resort of this latest attempt to govern Pakistan in the same old manner, unfortunately with the United State government, as usual, acting as an enabler, seems to be what Obama senses must come to an end.

His declaration that the Pakistani junta will no longer be given carte blanche to stonewall further on dislodging Al Qaeda from Waziristan cannot, therefore, be dismissed as the ranting of a politically immature novice, as his detractors aver; it is the right thing to say and should be seen as another instance of Obama once again getting ahead of the pack, as he did when he voted from the outset against the Bush administration's Iraq fiasco.

It indicates that Obama has thought more deeply about the Pakistan conundrum than have his fellow candidates in both political camps.

One hopes that he sticks to his guns and does not allow his detractors to erode his resolve. A sane political solution for Pakistan hangs in the balance.

Harold A Gould is a visiting scholar in the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Virginia, United States.

Other issues are more important to me---but this was the one that sold me on Obama. The rest fell into place.

I was one of those disengaged people that didn't used to bother voting because I didn't really see the point. I don't really know when I started to pay attention to what was taking place but I started to become really disturbed by some of Bush's policies. Abroad as well as at home. It also bothered me that things could never get done in DC because the Democrats and Republicans were always at a deadlock and it didn't really make a difference when the Democrats had the majority. Obama got my attention when he declared that he would be willing to talk to Iran. Finally, someone willing to talk with America's enemies. Then, I was drawn in further when he used inclusive language for Republicans. And he showed that he was more than willing to work with Republicans and that he has worked with Republicans to get stuff passed. It was just really refreshing to see someone who is willing to work with others that don't necessarily have the same point of view but is open. So, I've been volunteering and donating my time and money ever since to try to get him elected.

I chose Obama the first week of November, two months before the voting began, and I chose him because I saw a speech of his on Youtube and I realized, wow, a conscious and sentient person finally is running for President. I thought - he hasn't got a prayer against the do-or-die Clintons and their insider advantage, but I would stick by him until disillusionment set in and vote for Hillary when she inevitably swept the primaries.

And then something funny happened in Iowa...

Totally cliche, but for me it started with the 2004 National Convention speech. Obama's content, the way he framed his arguments, his diction, his charisma -- all made me think, here's someone who can combine the "intellectualism" of an Al Gore with the personal connection of a George W. Bush. Here's someone who can make intelligence an asset in national politics again. Then I spoke with my grandmother who lives in Illinois, and whom I consider the ultimate swing voter, since she's voted for Nader and for Bush in the two previous elections, and she was excited about Obama. From it was a gradually increasing commitment level, as the information I gathered (from Lawrence Lessig's slideshow to Obama's speech on faith) generally backed up my initial impression: this is someone who can win the presidency, and who, in doing so, would not only pursue policies that make sense, but would do so with a calculated, nuanced intelligence and the ability to inspire "ordinary" people.

I was initially impressed with Obama but supported Edwards on policy positions. Though I had tremendous admiration for her intellectual and political skills, I was always leery of a Clinton nomination due to the hostility she provokes from the right and the voter motivations that would fuel.

When Edwards was basically ignored by the press and therefore the public, I easily gravitated to Obama. The more I learned of him the more I was struck by how this was a man made for the moment.

The progressive movement that has been growing since 9/11 with the anti-war issue, picking up health care, global warming, foreign energy dependence, constitutional abuse, torture, the Katrina failure, predatory lending, EPA failures, NAFTA and job outsourcing, divisive politics, media consolidation, etc., etc., etc., has been a movement in need of a leader. Not one to just work at politics as usual, but to recognize the depth and breadth of our discontent and speak to it. And not just speak to it, but organize and lead it. I think Obama is answering that call.

And I think the rest is up to us.

Btw, your comments about video games reminded me of this bit from the Music Man:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=LI_Oe-jtgdI

I was once active and political, but had tuned out in disgust for most of the Bush presidency. You could say I was a success story for the Bush/Cheney "Disillusion as Many Americans as Possible" plan.

Obama was always in the back of my mind as a quaint possibility, but cynicism kept him from me for sometime.

I too am of mixed heritage. My mother is white and my father is a Filipino immigrant who worked the strawberry fields in the central coast of California.

One thing was constant: my vague and nagging suspicions of a Hillary Clinton candidacy.

When Obama won Iowa, my interest soared. I watched the NH debates and was pleased by his performance, as well as with Hillary's, knowing her to be a force with which to be reckoned. When the exit polls came out screaming an Obama win, I was optimistic, but then a bit deflated when Hillary's last emotional bid got her the win. I defended her moment as genuine, FWIW. I was now fully engaged.

Next, came SC. Bill's infamous comments threw me immediately, completely and unequivocally to Obama.

I cried watching his victory speech and immediately signed up on mybarackobama.com and raised almost $500 from a small group of family and friends. The rest, as they say, is history.

Since the Green Party hasn't had its convention yet, I can't answer this question in more detail.

For me, it was Richardson, Edwards, Obama, not necessarily in that order. Was excited about all three, the amount of excitement varying day by day. A pure toss-up at the end of last year.

I thought Clinton would be the nominee, which got me as excited as I felt when Kerry became the nominee.

Then my state of Michigan seemed to not matter. I voted for "Uncommitted." Obama made his rise. Saw his early speeches, early wins. He rocked the convention in 2004, but I had assumed he'd wait until next time. But no! Over the past few months it's been so obvious that he's honest, not pandering, not jerking chains nor reacting with knee-jerk partisanship.

The notion of video game positions guiding your judgement makes sense. It's the kind of pander you'd expect any politician to make. But it's pointless, as pointless as promising to police naughty rock or hip hop. As pointless as the gas tax holiday.

I didn't know Obama hasn't come out as a GTA hater. Thanks, Scalfin, for giving me yet another reason to like the guy.

I just sense that Obama is the real straight-talker.

I started off enthusiastic about Clinton, Obama and Edwards. My first hint of a problem with Obama came in S. Carolina when he invited a rabid homophobe by the name of Donny McClurkin to MC his campaign's southern gospel tour. McClurkin has said that gays are a curse and are out to kill America's children. He used the tour to preach against gays. When the controversy erupted, Obama attempted to explain it away by saying he was only trying to bring gays and conservative Christians together. I saw it as pandering to black Baptist bigots. Next came Obama's assertion that Hillary had belittled Martin Luther King when she said that it took Lyndon Johnson to push through the civil rights legislation of the 1960's. I saw that as divisive and playing the race card in an attempt to drive a wedge between Hillary and her black supporters. Meanwhile Edwards' campaign never caught on. Gradually as more things came to light about Obama I came to the conclusion which I still hold, which is that Obama has many negatives and vulnerabilities including but not limited to Jeremiah Wright, and I sincerely believe Obama is unlikely to beat McCain. Meanwhile my respect for Clinton grew. I see her as the stronger candidate, and the one that would have beaten McCain. I hope to be proven wrong, but I am not expecting it.

I don't have a TV but I remember going to someone's house in town to watch the Dem Convention and being completely turned off by the whole thing. It was a circus, not a convention. Yuck.

So then an election that was not properly contested in court in OH, just another problem like the 2000 election problem in FL. Yes, I firmly believe both elections were stolen.

But I could never vote for someone who promotes NAFTA. Before it ever passed Congress, I knew it was a terrible idea for labor and the environment. So Clinton was not an option. Screwing around with bimbos? Boy, if you're going to hold that against him you'd better rethink JFK.

So it couldn't be Clinton. And I'm her demographic, except that women's lib has always been wrong about what it was fighting for. (I see the whole movement as fighting for women to be able to have heart attacks at 55 like men. The movement should have been fighting for a 20-hr work week for both genders so children had parents. Now we have children being raised by daycare and nannies and everyone working way too much for their physical, intellectual and spiritual health.)

Then Iowa. This guy won, and I found myself looking at his Youtube victory speech. And he was saying things that sounded like they were honest. You gotta be kidding, this can't be real.

I think what influenced me the most to investigate and then support Barack Obama was the fact that his mother - his most important early influence - was an anthropologist. Have to admit to bias, since I'm one too. She was not an academic anthropologist but worked in applied development projects that were focused on empowering women. This type of nurturing is certainly a large part of the reason for Obama's world view, foreign policy perspective, and his feminism.

I'm tired of the ethnocentric, xenophobic rhetoric that is passed off as "debate" in this country, and is a driving force behind our position on the world stage.

Hopefully Obama can begin to change that.

I have been evaluating the political scene since the early '80's and view Ronald Reagan's presidency as the turning point when original American values became secondary and when any functional balancing of powers was forcefully and intentionally dismantled.
When Reagan did his power play against the air traffic controllers' union, he used the presidency to take out the power of the only organized force [labor] still strong enough to countervail against the power of corporate greed, such corporate greed gaining ascendancy within the military-industrial complex [warned about by Eisenhower] and holding power by the decades long focus on a 'cold war'.
Since the Reagan presidency, we have seen a sharp decline in the national government's willingness to invest in and further 'the common good'. Instead, we have seen the national government become functionally married to and only answerable to the corporate powers. In the 80's, there were about 1,000 lobbyists in Washington and today, there are more than 35,000 lobbyists in Washington.
A corollary development to maintain this unbalanced [against the common good] Washington power structure is the politics of dividing the electorate by wedge issues and emotional issues, to essentially divide and conquer the will of the masses, using the mass media to divert the public from the deeper problems suffered by the commoners.
Into this historical context comes a brilliant organizer who has done the one thing that can begin to change Washington and re-establish a better balance of power going forward. Obama has grown a mass movement of citizens, which is the only power we citizens could hope to have to alter the entrenched power of the elites who were given the keys to the kingdom by Reagan.

It signifies everything to me that Obama rightly says he needs all of us to work on the changes needed, i.e., that we have to do this together. That is so true.
It signifies everything to me that Hillary Clinton speaks only in terms of her being a 'fighter' on behalf of the little people......and that she will alone 'take on the powerful interests' if only we choose her. That is so unreal as to be laughable, in light of her compromises about 'lobbyists' and especially in light of she and Bill adapting themselves into that unbalanced power structure elite category to the tune of 109 million dollars.

I started a Hillary supporter (mostly based on my admiration for Bill's Presidency). I liked Obama early but didn't think he had a prayer against the Clinton machine. I listened to all of the candidates & believe any one of them would be an immense improvement over Bush. Along the way I started reading about the candidates & surprisingly the more I read about Obama the more there is to like. The more I read on Hillary the more I saw a record of political opportunism & pandering that didn't square with my views. As much as Obama won me over, Clinton lost me with some of the things she's said & done & the horrible way she's run her campaign.

I favored Richardson for his executive experience as governor and foreign policy work under the Clinton Adm. But what eventually got me to look much more closely at the Obama campaign was the fact that he opened an office here in Boise.

I drove by the office every day with its bright signs on the windows and at first I was dumbstruck. Idaho, the state that national Democrats had written off, the state that overwhelmingly voted for Bush twice, the state where Democrats were used to getting beaten up in the state legislature...and Obama opened up an office, with a paid staff!

My husband and I visited the office took as many of the informational brochure as possible. We also talked with the volunteers, some of whom had come from different parts of the country. We went to several meetings and people of all ages showed up--17 year old high school volunteers to a group of ladies in their 70s who brought food and treats for the phone bank operators.

But what ultimately hooked us was Obama's visit to our city. No other Democratic candidate made the journey and that was an important distinction. For many of the 14000 of us, crowded into the stadium, it was the first time that Democrats and sympathizers saw each other. The 50 state strategy was at work that day.

Finally, Obama did not constantly play defense against the Republicans. Democrats have been on the defense for decades and we have allowed the Right and the Republicans to frame the debate and the issues. Obama's confidence about this country, its potential and promises, and his work on reshaping the electorate and bringing into the Democratic fold new people are not only inspiring but more practically, it gives me a sense that things will get done.

I started to follow and like Obama during his 2004 senate race.

The Chicago Tribune was my daily paper, so I had a daily recap of the insanity in both races. It was easily the most FUBAR'ed contest I'd ever seen. It's not an exaggeration to say the Democratic nomination fell to him. Blair Hull had more money than anyone else and the lead for most of the race and Dan Hynes was a child (literally) of the Chicago machine. But Hull had some domestic abuse history he wouldn't come clean about, and Hynes didn't have much to offer beyond his name. If either had been competent Obama wouldn't have stood a chance. Just getting the Dem nomination was a lottery ticket in itself, but then the Republicans imploded and Alan Keyes moved in from Maryland to take their nomination. I remember thinking many times through the spring and summer of 2004 that this Obama was the luckiest SOB on earth.

But I started to notice Obama's substance in the car wreck coverage of that race. His speech on Iraq in 2002 was a breath of fresh air. Then I found the old Chicago Reader story about his work as an activist and his decision to get into politics. I also really like how he campaigned in the general. He and David Axelrod got into a car and drove through countless small towns downstate that summer, before the speech at the DNCC made him famous, stopping and walking the sidewalks to introduce himself and talk with voters. It was unheard of for a Chicago Democrat to do that, and against Keyes it was totally unnecessary. But I like that it showed he wasn't just running to be the Senator of Democrats from Chicago. He won almost all of those rural counties, too.

I think what locked it up for me is when Obama stood up to the Daley machine and did not block the re-nomination of Patrick Fitzgerald to be the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. That took stones. All this happened in the first six months after Obama took office in Washington. Dailey desperately wanted Fitzgerald to go, and it was widely believed that Obama was threatened with a primary challenge in 2010 if he didn't push for a new appointment. Republicans had their own reasons for wanting Fitzgerald to go, of course. All of this meant was the only one who could push Fitzgerald out at the end of his term was Obama because he was the only one with clean hands. When Obama refused to play along, Fitzgerald got his second term. Daley was said to be beyond furious.

Something to remember about the whole improbable rise of Barack Obama. The only reason it happened is because Karl Rove pushed the incumbent Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald into retirement for not being sufficiently loyal to the Bush White House and Denny Hastert. Senator Fitzgerald only quit the Senate because Rove promised to have the WH back a primary challenger against him, which would have cost the self-financing Fitzgerald tens of millions of dollars out of his pocket. If Fitzgerald had stayed in the race, he probably would have won.

Otto....

Interesting perspectyive.

But as a gay man... I can never forget what the Clintons did in the 1990's.

My generation will always be haunted by DONT ASK DONT TELL. It was a sham policy and I felt that Clinton threw his gay supporters under the bus.

And I will never never never forgive Clinton for signing the Defense of Marriage Act. I know a veto would have been overturned... but it was a matter of principle. That act will prevent marriage rights for gay people for multiple generations.

And before you say that was Bill, and not Hillary... Hillary doesn't get to claim the victories of Bill and not get burdennd by the failures.

I simply don't trust Hillary's gay rhetoric. I've heard it all before, and it was all a sham. I prefer Obama's measured and controled steps when it comes to gay issues and policy. baby steps will get you to your objective. Obama isn't going to delive the "whole enchilada" but he isn't promising the whole enchilada. Hillary is promising the whole enchilada and is going to deliver nothing in the end... just like Bill.

That kept me from ever supporting Hillary, and Obama's message inspired me.

Any time a gay peron starts ranting about Obama and how great the Clinton's are...all I say is DONT ASK DONT TELL and DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE ACT. It's an ugly and horrible legacy on gay issues.

Obama has been my first choice all along for two main reasons:

One, his consistent opposition to the War in Iraq (I was personally opposed to it from the start as well, and have a hard time getting past the votes to authorize it); and

Two, the fact that he taught Constitutional Law at one of this country's premier law schools. The Constitution is going to need a lot of expert TLC, and not just partisan patchups, in this next administration.

The fact that he's a great motivator and a great speaker is icing on the cake.

I wrote: "I wouldn't vote for her (or Bill) for dog-catcher now."

Fosberry responded: "I trust that this (and other similar sentiment others express) is simply venting understandable frustration at the Clintons.

I try to remain as pragmatic as possible about voting, and I can always imagine the possibility of a worse candidate. And I would certainly take Hillary over a worse candidate. And I believe McCain is a worse candidate."

I bounced this around a LOT when I was concerned that Hillary might actually get the nomination. And I honestly don't know how I'd feel by November. But my feeling now is that I couldn't vote for either Hillary or McCain. Which I know is a cop-out on some level. I couldn't vote for McCain on policy grounds. I could easily vote for Hillary on policy grounds, but I don't know that I could reward her (and Bill's) behavior in this campaign with my vote. I feel like they've descended to Nixonian and Rovian levels in this campaign. I expect the Republicans to disgust me and am never shocked by it (which is a big part of why they never get my vote). I'm pretty amazed and angry to see the same kind of crap in a Democratic primary.

Its very possible I'd calm down by November and vote for Hillary if she'd been the nominee. But its also very possible I wouldn't. I'm glad I won't have to find out.

Scalfin - are you perhaps of Canadian or British (or Aussie etc.) extraction? "Favoured" is not something Americans usually write...

BTW it's "affect". Both "effect" and "affect" can be used as either a verb or a noun, but unless you are in love with long words, "effect" is almost certain to be a noun and "affect" a verb.