Why I Support Barack Obama

As the Democratic primary process got under way, I started out genuinely torn between Hillary and Obama. I loved the Clinton presidency. I had heard Hillary speak several times before she ran for the presidency, and I always loved what she had to say.

But I was angry that she voted for the authorization of power to Bush to go into Iraq. I was also apprehensive that the vicious partisanship and polarization that had been directed towards both Bill and Hillary Clinton during the first Clinton presidency would recur. I wanted something different from the array of Clintons and Bushes who had held the Oval Office for the past 20 years. Something inside me felt that we needed someone new.

The more I've learned about Obama, the more I've grown to like him and to love him. Many are worried that he is too liberal, but the more you examine him and delve into his past, the more you will see that he is actually a closet centrist. He started out at the anti-establishment margins -- in the black neighborhoods of Chicago, where he had to join a somewhat radical congregation to establish his street cred as a black leader. Hence Reverend Wright.

BUT -- as he has risen from community organizer to state senator, from the tough streets of Chicago to the hallowed precincts of the Senate in Washington D.C., he has gravitated to the center. What I have learned about his childhood and schooling through law school tells me that this movement towards the center is more in line with who Obama truly is.

Obama is a biracial man who was raised in a white family. To have peace within himself, he had to have found a way to reconcile and harmonize both sides of his heritage and identity. I can absolutely see the parallel in his mission and drive to reconcile and harmonize the competing and all too often conflicting sides of our American heritage and identity. He is a unifier by nature, all the way down to his DNA.