I'll be voting for Obama in November, but not because of his race. In fact, one of the things that's impressed me about the guy is that he hasn't run on his race; he hasn't been a Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton who seemed only to want to make a point about race. The Presidency is far too important to be used as a symbol, and trying to do so has automatically disqualified people like Jackson and Sharpton, as far as I'm concerned.

I agree with ER that there's no curriculum to train for the Presidency, and often experience can be a negative if the person settles into a familiar rut and loses the ability to respond to unique circumstances. As a practical matter, when we talk about national politicians having experience, it means only that they have experience playing political games in Washington.

I see in Obama a keen intelligence and a wide-ranging curiosity about the world, and those traits produce people who can think their way through new situations in real time. He won't waste time wracking his brain to remember the last time he dealt with a similar situation, or look up the answer in the book of ideology; and he'll thereby also avoid the risk of mistaking similarity for identity--what worked last time won't always work this time. With Obama you get custom-built solutions; with "experienced" politicians like McCain and Clinton you get off-the-rack generic formulae.

In the particular area of foreign policy where McCain tries to claim that being a POW makes him qualified, I hear Obama speaking with clarity and depth. He recognized from the beginning the folly of invading Iraq. He didn't get suckered into taking sides in the Georgian conflict (probably doesn't have an advisor who's a paid lobbyist for the Republic of Georgia). He sees the "war on terror" as not uniformly a military problem, though sometimes as in Afghanistan that's appropriate; but also sees the interplay of regional politics with Pakistan and Iran, and seems to grasp how we've turned long-standing power relationships upside down in the region.

Obama's world tour demonstrated an appreciation of America's place in the world. If we want to proclaim ourselves the leader of the world, then don't our principles of representative democracy obligate at least taking into account the wishes and opinions of all those "nonvoting citizens"? Our forefathers disliked being in that position so much that they held a revolution; we don't want to push the world so far that it all rebels against us. Hubris is a bitch, and for all our military power, we won't survive if "all men's hands are turned against us".

I'm glad you're going to vote for Obama despite your reservations, Buck. I hope I've given you some reason to feel easier about it. He'll do fine.