New Yorker endorses Obama

The New Yorker was not a favorite on Barack Obama's reading list for a while after a notorious cover showed him in Arabic garb fist-bumping his wife in the Oval Office as Old Glory burned in the fireplace. It was meant to be a satire of attacks on Obama, but he wasn't happy.

But he probably feels better about the magazine today after it endorsed him for president.

The endorsement, posted online today and scheduled to appear in the Oct. 13 issue, starts with a rather lengthy catalogue of the failings of President Bush and of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

It is only a sizable chunk into the endorsement that Obama is even mentioned: "On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic Party’s nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalized language of “reform,” but only Obama has provided a convincing, rational, and fully developed vision."

The magazine's editors go on to praise Obama's policy positions and his character -- particularly in contrast to McCain's.

"The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain," the endorsement says. "Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace. By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm.

The praise becomes more effusive in conclusion: "The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama."