This Is How to Write an Endorsement

[Media] Have you read the New Yorker's endorsement of presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama? The column explores the backgrounds of both Obama and his Republican challenger Sen. John McCain, examines the challenges the next United States president must face, and considers the consequences resulting from either candidate's election. Now, that's how you write a thoughtful political endorsement. An excerpt:

Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. ... His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.

(Brandon Burt)