Esquire, in its first endorsement in seventy-five years, echoes Garry Wills. Yes, something profound is at stake on Tuesday:
More than any other recent election, we are voting this year not merely for
a president but to overthrow two governments. The one we can see is the one
in which constitutional order has been defaced, the national spirit
degraded, and the country unrecognizable because so much of the best of
itself has been sold off or frittered away. The other one is the far more
insidious one, a doppelgänger nation of black prisons, shredded memos, and
secret justifications for even more secret crimes. Moreover, the current
administration has worked hard not only to immunize itself from the
political and legal consequences of the government we can see, but it has
also worked within the one we cannot see in order to perpetuate itself...
There is no evidence at all that anything will change under a President John
McCain, who has already identified Roberts and Alito as his beau ideals of
Supreme Court justices. He has made brave noises about torture and the
extraconstitutional prerogatives of the executive, but President Bush and
his men went on and did what they wanted anyway, and McCain walked away,
begging for votes from fundamentalists who hate him, meeping his displeasure
in ways that were barely audible. The virus will gestate and spread on his
watch, all throughout the federal government. Bushism must be ripped out,
root and branch, everywhere it has been established, or else the
presidential election of 2008 is a worthless exercise in futility.
Barack
Obama may not be the man to do it, but John McCain, for all his laudable
qualities, clearly is neither willing nor able to do so.
To continue to govern ourselves this way is unthinkable. It is unsustainable
as a democracy to continue to mock so egregiously in secret what we continue
to profess in public. That is the task for the next president. That is the
main reason to vote for Barack Obama of Illinois. We strongly encourage you
to do so.
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