So who is this Barack Obama guy anyway, really, and why should someone in Virginia think he’s the right choice to be our next President?

I want to share my perspective on Senator Obama, as someone who’s spent quality time in Virginia – UVA, Class of 1983 – and who, along with my wife, has known him since, well since before he was Barack Obama, the national political leader.

I’m particularly reminded today because I had the chance to do for someone else what he did for me 12 years ago. Back in 1995 I was seeking the Democratic nomination for State Representative and Barack was a State Senator from another district where we’d previously lived. I was a first-time candidate and he was advising me on my run. A two-hour lunch at a Greek restaurant, great, frank and often philosophical observations about politics and governing.

Anyway, what I want you to know is two things. One, he is as he seems, and as he always has been. While he has a ready laugh and a good smile, he also has a major intellect. He’s not heavy-handed about it but you know right away that this is a seriously smart and knowledgeable person with a penetrating and curious mind. There is a reason he used to teach Constitutional Law at a place as august as the University of Chicago law school. The guy has some serious game. A stark contrast with the current occupant of the White House, for whom Actual Information seems at best inconvenient.

The second thing is that he has always been focused on using what he knows and doing what he can to help make people’s lives better. I’ve been fortunate to know several unnecessarily smart people and I can tell you that his mind is focused on the common good. Even if you disagree with him – and there isn’t much I disagree with him on – he comes to that place with conviction, issue by issue, with a great deal of thought. After Columbia Barack worked as an organizer in underclass black urban neighborhoods. After Harvard he chose civil rights law. He’s in this for the right reasons.

They say that when President Bush is speaking, you can see him running through the script in his mind, trying to make sure he says all he’s supposed to say. Barack is one of those people who’s mind runs so fast you can see he sometimes has trouble choosing which element he’s thinking about at that precise moment to articulate. It’s why he speaks…deliberately.

It’s also why his speech to the DNC back in 2004 is so important. It’s because he wrote it, not a speechwriter. Sure he had advice and people to edit things, but it was his. What you heard is what you get.

Why this is important to Virginians, in my opinion, relates to three other well-known Virginians, all former Governors of the Commonwealth.

The first is former Governor Mark Warner. Having had the privilege of meeting Gov. Warner a few times (I was a volunteer here in Illinois for the upstart draft movement before he bowed out and before Barack got in) I can tell you that the same take-me-as-I-am qualities that many found so refreshing about Gov. Warner are also to be found in Sen. Obama. Sure the heat of the press lights can sometimes tinge a person – anything else and you would be inhuman – but both of those guys seem comfortable in their own skin.

Virginians like guts, and they like people who have them. They also have an admiration for someone willing to be the first black man to step up as a major candidate for high office. It is no accident that former Gov. Doug Wilder has been such a fervent supporter of Mark Warner’s. It is also no accident that so many folks I know from the Draft Mark Warner movement, nationwide, have found themselves in the Obama camp since then.

The third is who we from UVA refer to as Mr. Jefferson. Jefferson, recent revisionism notwithstanding, was above all a man of high ideals. Like Sen. Obama he was also a pretty decent writer (…) and it was Jefferson’s ability to give form to large things that justifiably earns our eternal respect, admiration and gratitude.

Our country, the United States we love, has been harmed by the Bush administration and by Karl Rove’s Republican Party. The relationship between the Executive and Legislative branches has been severely compromised (and don’t even get me started about the Judicial…). Our nation’s standing as justifiably the leader of the free world has been precluded by dishonest, warmongering, extra-Constitutional attacks on others, and on the meaning of America. Our politics and our national security have been polarized to a degree not known since the days of William Randolph Hearst’s yellow-journalistically-fed jingoism.

We are hurt. Our politics are broken. We cannot fix anything else – healthcare, immigration, the environment – until we begin to fix how we, as a people, govern ourselves. We need a leader who sees the big picture, who lives and breathes it, who embodies it. We need a leader with sound judgment – not perfection; no one is perfect and we must guard against expecting that – but someone who is tough enough to be right on the big issues.

Senator Obama was right on the #1 issue of our day, President Bush’s war of choice in Iraq. He is also right – because he has taught about it – that our fundamental institutions of government, and our political mechanisms for operating them, need to be healed.

He has the ability – if we can get him to the White House – to attack the great issues of our day as a moral leader. I do not speak for him or his campaign but I ask you, for example, if there is anyone you can think of who as President would have greater moral standing to stop the genocide in Darfur once and for all? There is a reason Barack is greeted the way he is when he travels around the world. He gets it – and the rest of the world gets it. They’re just waiting for us.

We need the world to see once again that the United States…is the Unites States again.

Senator Barack Obama is right to focus on the future. We have had enough of the destructiveness of the past. The Bush/Clinton/Bush cycle must be broken. We cannot govern by polls and we cannot govern by fiat and we cannot govern ourselves by personal grudges and family self-interest. We need to step forward. Barack knows the way. I hope you will join us as we head there.

Eric Davis
Oak Park, Illinois

Note:  Eric Davis is the former director of the Illinois Draft Mark Warner organization and founder of Democracy for Illinois, the state coordinating group for Democracy for America, formed in the aftermath of Howard Dean's 2004 White House bid.

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