Tomorrow I am going to go to the Club Lucky restaurant in Chicago, Illinois and vote for Barack Obama to retain his position as President of the United States. There are lots of reasons why, including all the normal policy agreements that a big-city Democrat would have with a solid Democratic President from the same big city.
But the big reason is values. On issue after issue— the right to marry and the right to choose, on stopping war and expanding unemployment benefits, the President puts his values into action, and sets the country on the right course.
I remember the horror of the 1992 Republican National Convention and the “Culture War” speech by failed Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. The speech scared the hell out of me, and the national narrative that drove the conservative side of that election was deeply disturbing.
The phrase “values voters” started around this time, and it always annoyed me. The framing was that conservative people had values and we— the people in the cities, the people of tolerance and acceptance, were “malcontents”, according to Buchanan. He railed against civil rights, equal pay, separation of church and state, and a whole host of other issues that are at the core of the President’s work.
It is twenty years later, the night before election night. Our President shares our values, and the wind is at our backs. Tomorrow we’ll find out if it is the will of the American people to continue this course. I am voting yes.