Proud Clinton Supporter Enthusiastic About Obama

By Peggy Griffith, Local 4302  
Peggy Griffith is the elected secretary for CWA Local 4302, which serves Akron and Canton, Ohio. She serves on her local's Legislative Committee and is a longtime political activitist.

Like many of you and millions of other Americans, I was behind Hillary Clinton 100 percent during the primaries.

Senator Clinton has always been a champion of working families and a big supporter of universal health care and the Employee Free Choice Act. That's why I supported her; not because she's a woman. But like many women who can remember a time when we routinely made less money than men for the same work and were passed over for promotions, I was naturally excited about the prospect of electing the first woman as president of the United States.

I still hope I can do that someday. But this year, I'm proudly and enthusiastically going to volunteer and vote for Senator Barack Obama. After 71/2  disastrous years of Republican rule by a wing of the party that is rabidly anti-union and puts corporate profits above all other priorities, Obama is a breath of fresh air.

From his days as a community organizer in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods to his state senate seat and now as a U.S. senator, Obama has shown that he's not just talk. He has joined workers on picket lines, he is deeply concerned about the education of our children, he wants fair trade agreements and green energy policies that will help create new living-wage jobs for Americans while helping our environment; he wants to make sure Social Security is there for generations to come and he is calling for corporate and bankruptcy law reforms to protect pensions.

One of the issues Obama and Clinton sparred over in the primaries was health care. The truth is that the differences in their plans were minor. Their goal was and still is the same: to make health care accessible and affordable for all Americans.

That's not remotely John McCain's goal. In fact, his plan calls for taxing the health care benefits that you get from your employer. He wants to push more people into private insurance without requiring those companies to cover you. If you're older or sick or have been sick, you may be out of luck.

Obama has also promised that the Employee Free Choice Act will become law when he's president, and he's spoken about it before general audiences as well as labor unions.

John McCain voted against Employee Free Choice and still actively opposes it — and any other method of allowing majority signup organizing, according to his own website. His track record on workers' rights is dismal and he has made it clear that, just like the Bush administration, businesses will come first and workers, second, at best, in a McCain White House.

How many more years of that can you stand? It's time to vote for someone who inspires hope, who will rebuild our middle class, who will restore our country's reputation around the world. Someone — and this is critically important — who will not allow our Supreme Court to have a permanent, hard right-wing majority that casts all its votes with big business.

It seems like a quaint notion after the last seven-plus years, but Obama believes that our nation's leaders should serve the people's interests instead of the special interests.

That is the change we are looking for.