Better than I could put it.

I usually keep quiet on politics in the public arena, but I've been searching for a way to justify just what I like about Barack Obama and what bugs me about John McCain (who I would have been okay with as president until his reckless pick for a running mate and he renounced his high road, semi-maverick status for lies, damned lies, and continuation of damned lies even after the damned lies had been debunked seven times over).

This story from D Magazine by conservative Wick Allison sums up much of what I like about the Barack Obama candidacy.

From the article:

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.

In addition, John Dickerson at Slate helped quell some of my fears and panic by reiterating that Obama's cool (and that of his extended campaign for that matter) has been kept in recent weeks in ways that echo how he kept his cool throughout firestorms in the primary season.

Or maybe [the Obama campaign is] not rattled because they've been through this before. If they'd listened to the polls and Democratic experts, they'd never have gotten in the race. In the summer of 2007, there were lots of Obama supporters who thought he should panic a little more—or risk losing to Hillary Clinton. The Obama campaign stuck to its plan and won. Aides often cite this lesson in explaining why they're not going to overreact now.

Cool under fire. I like that in a leader.

YMMV.