Robert Ryan, a retired vice president and CFO of Medtronic, said Obama's health care proposal would benefit the uninsured and underinsured.
Lois Quam, a onetime UnitedHealth executive and now managing director of alternative investments for Piper Jaffray, said business leaders should be concerned about McCain's decision-making skills, pointing to his selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a hasty bow to the right wing of the Republican Party. Quam is a longtime Democratic contributor, was a Hillary Clinton delegate to the Democratic National Convention and is the wife of former DFL House Majority Leader Matt Entenza.
Two Seattle-area venture capitalists who have long supported Republican candidates are tossing their support behind presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Bill Ruckelshaus, who led the Environmental Protection Agency in the Nixon and Reagan administrations and currently serves as a strategic director at Madrona Venture Group, said in a statement released today that the "stakes are too high" not to support Obama. He went on to cite Obama's plan to reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil by focusing on clean energy technologies.
Bob Nelsen, the co-founder and managing partner of Arch Venture
Partners, offered this rationale for supporting Obama. "I have never voted for a Democrat for President in my life because I never saw a true leader like Senator Obama who wants to lead the world by building on what is best about America. I trust Senator Obama to do the right thing and to listen to dissenting views. I believe he deeply cares about the country as whole, not just a few partisan factions. I am not voting for him based on a list of his positions, but I will cast my vote based on a belief that he is the right man at the right time for the United States."
The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal recently faulted McCain's
attack on the SEC chairman as "unpresidential", saying the assault on Mr Cox was both false and deeply unfair. The broadside came as polls show his Democrat rival, Barack Obama, edging ahead in key swing states amid public anxiety over the banking crisis.
Note the Extraordinary Candor and Brilliance in this Letter from Frank Schaeffer:
Dear Republicans:
This election all Republicans who love America must vote for Obama. A vote for business-as-usual and a continuation of the Neoconservative/Religious Right/ party of corporate American alienation is a vote against America. As a former Republican activist, I appeal to your patriotism and honor.
Unless you haven't been paying attention to the recent history of the
Republican Party you will know that today Republican ideology and energy is derived from three sources:* The Religious Right,
* The Neoconservative Movement,
* Corporate business interests.
You also should know that when it comes to the Religious Right my late
father and evangelist, Francis Schaeffer, was the intellectual voice that
made it happen. As his young sidekick (in the 70s and 80s) I helped take his message to a huge evangelical audience. I mention this by way of saying that even if you hate my guts -- for having dropped out of the Republican Party, for writing novels that make fun of you, and for reregistering as an independent voter, let alone for supporting Senator Obama -- perhaps youshould listen up. I happen to know what I'm talking about.The Religious Right came about for one reason and one reason only: it was a reaction to Roe v. Wade and the legalization of abortion in 1973. The Supreme Court essentially created the culture wars. (A state-by-state approach to legalizing abortion would have been better and resulted in much the same situation we have today in terms of the availability of abortion.) Take Roe out of the political mix and there would be no Religious Right.
That said -- certain power-hungry individuals (Dobson, Falwell, Robertson, Rove, Reed et al.) took the energy of our original pro-life movement and
used it to build a hate campaign reminiscent of the early momentum that drove European Fascist parties in the mid-1920s through the mid-1940s. Fear of the "other" gays, immigrants, intellectuals, artists, the media,
feminists, etc., morphed into a general critique of "the elite" which turned out to be anyone with an education or even big city dwellers. The Religious Right became a crude populist movement pitting the resentful rubes against the rest.
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