dear pennsylvania, ohio, missouri, indiana, florida, north carolina, virginia, nevada, colorado and new hampshire

I am voting for Barack Obama.

sadly, I have never seen this country as divided as it's been over the past eight years.
and for this I blame Bush/Rove/Cheney and the ramrod Republicans who have treated our government as if it were some winner-take-all ballgame without regard for the consequences.

while Bill Clinton's military service was no more impressive than that of Bush 43, Clinton, unlike Bush and the 527s, did not attempt to cover his own tracks by denigrating the service records of Bush 41 or Bob Dole.
the "swift boating" of John Kerry was, to my mind, unconscionable.
and the whisper campaign against John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 (that he had become unstable while imprisoned in Vietnam, among other lies) was equally unconscionable.

and yet the lesson that John McCain seems to have learned from his fellow Republicans, from the same group that so unmercifully attacked him eight years prior, is do unto others before they do unto you.

rather than spending the last few days of this long campaign presenting the case for his own presidency, McCain operatives have decided to continue their series of unsuccessful political stunts in hopes that something, anything will finally stick.

today alone, in the campaign's final hours (when you would think some kind of summation would be in order), I heard that Barack Obama is "a socialist," that he "pals around with domestic terrorists," that he intends to tax 401k contributions as well as the income of anyone who makes more than $42,000 in a year, and that over 50% of all small businesses will face higher taxes in an Obama administration.
I have heard talk of a real America and a phony America (centered, according to John McCain in his interview with Brian Williams, in New York and Washington, interestingly enough the only two American cities to suffer a foreign attack in the past half-century) and I have seen television ads that feature Jeremiah Wright's fiery rhetoric, and heard the cheer "John McCain! No Hussein!"

the worst part is, John McCain knows better.
John McCain knows that after an unnecessary and mismanaged war, the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, the doubling of our national debt and the abandonment of a great American city in its hour of need, our country's problems do not center around a Chicago minister or who served with who on a non-profit founded by one of Ronald Reagan's closest friends.
I know that John McCain knows better.

we will never solve our country's very serious problems with such fear-mongering, calculated alienation and disregard for the truth (wasn't it a Republican who once said something like a house divided against itself cannot stand?).
after eight long years, isn't it time to turn away from mean-spirited divisiveness and cynicism and at least take a chance on unity and optimism?

I believe so.
and that is why I am voting for Barack Obama.