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This is a response to some of the comments about whether Obama is "qualified" or what his experience is vis-a-vis his competitor(s).
The most qualified candidates, at least on paper, would probably be Mitt Romney, Joe Biden and Bill Richardson. Their resumes are all very impressive.
But Romney just causes people to gag -- including, it seems, his fellow Republican candidates -- and Biden and Richardson, for whatever reasons, failed to excite or inspire enough followers.
When we elect a president, we're not electing a resume. We're selecting a person to trust with our future. We're looking for a certain intangible, unquantifiable quality. And yes, I know we've chosen several terrible leaders this way, but we've also picked some good ones. FDR, for example, was seen as something of a lightweight early on, but he had that intangible, unquantifiable leadership quality.
I don't know if Obama is simply the flavor of the month or the guy with what it takes to inspire and lead this country. For now, I'm backing him; I have confidence in his values and his judgment and I think his various experiences in life, though not quite the same as those outlined in Mitt Romney's resume, count for something.
(this is also a very belated response to the Gloria Steinem criticism that Obama would be nowhere if he were a woman with the same resume. First, that's not true -- plenty of women have come from "nowhere" to win elections and become political leaders. And secondly, of course, it's not really about the resume.)
