There are times when Esquire magazine’s smug sense of self-satisfaction renders it virtually unreadable.

There are times when Esquire magazine produces splendid pieces of writing.

Today’s (far from fulsome) endorsement of Barack Obama, an extract from which is set out below, very much falls into the latter category.

Senator Obama is the only one of the two candidates who seems to believe in the idea of a political commonwealth, that there are those things — be they the guarantees in the Bill of Rights or mountains in Alaska — that we own together. Barack Obama stands, however inchoately and however diffidently, for the notion that a common purpose is necessary for common problems, that “government,” as it is designed in our founding documents, is our collective responsibility. It is this collective responsibility that built America into a great power without peer in the history of the world. And it is this collective responsibility that has succumbed to nearly thirty years of phony rightist populism, corporate brigandage, and the wildly cheered abandonment of a common American civic purpose. It is shocking that in America an argument for salvaging the common good is regarded as a radical notion by anyone, but that is where we are. And that is what Barack Obama seems to stand for. After all, as a young man with his potential, he could have headed straight to midtown Manhattan and made a fortune. Instead, he took a church job working for poor people in Chicago, and for his troubles, he and those poor people have been viciously jeered by the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin. Such is their regard for the common good. And such is Obama’s promise. And in that, however inchoately and however diffidently, Obama stands not only against Bushism, but against Reaganism, which gave it birth. And that is more than enough.

This year it’s more than enough because we are not all in that enterprise together anymore, and we have not been for some time. For seven years, for the purposes of deceitful war-making and constitutional vandalism, the president chose to preside over “the base,” and the devil take the common good. For several years, before the war soured, and New Orleans drowned, and he meddled grotesquely with how a woman’s family in Florida chose to allow her to die, and mocked the very institutions he was to protect, this was praised as the height of political acumen. The incompetent president and his wolfish advisors were encouraged and enabled in their various schemes and praised for their cleverness into the bargain. Anyone who questioned what was going on — any member of what was once memorably described to writer Ron Suskind as the “reality-based community” — was of no consequence, their voices ignored, their concerns as foreign as those of a tribesman in New Guinea.

And now, with it all in ruins, it’s time to move ahead, without recriminations or even without maintaining the simple clarity of the historical record? That is not change we can believe in. And that is precisely where Barack Obama is frozen. But make no mistake, in our view the senator from Illinois is the only possible choice to lead the country.

Obscured by Obama’s dithering is the fact that his Republican counterpart is one of the first presidential candidates in history to run as a parody of himself. John McCain has decided on a cheap and dishonorable campaign. He has embraced the tactics with which he was slandered in 2000, and he has hired the people responsible for them. In so doing, he has become something of a mockery of everything he once purported to be. He has stated that he wouldn’t now vote for his own immigration bill. He has operated in violation of the very campaign-finance law that bears his name. And even though his own body bears the scars of torture, he has silenced himself on the issue of the torture sanctioned and designed by the government he seeks to lead, so as not to alienate “the base.” The most underutilized trope of the campaign is the notion that John McCain is running against John McCain.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the senator was leading a movement that had been exiled for decades and was now storming back to Washington to save the country from its oppressors. Of course, the truth is that it is the excesses of McCain’s own party from which the country needs to be saved. That McCain is now attempting to seize the mantle of “change” for himself is profoundly absurd. And that he expects the American people to swallow it is profoundly insulting. History demands that this election be a referendum on the Bush years, and John McCain has tried desperately to change the subject.

There was a moment, in 2000, when he might have gone a different way. He gave a brave speech in Virginia, and he seemed genuinely interested in prying his party from the clutches of corporate avarice and theocratic lunacy. If he had held to the substance of that speech, instead of merely to its form, he might have been as transformational a figure on his side of the aisle as Obama has been on his. However, McCain has spent the past few years dancing like a monkey on a string, making brave noises in public that he later abandoned in private. And now he genuflects to Pastor Warren and a hundred other preachers who are a hundred times worse, people whom he called “agents of intolerance” eight years ago, when John McCain still had the soul he’s sold off piecemeal to pay the salaries of the men he’s hired out of Karl Rove’s shop.

Then, of course, he picked an agent of intolerance to join him on his ticket. But it is not Governor Palin’s religious beliefs that are of concern to us. More to the point, there is no serious debate to be had over Sarah Palin’s preparedness to be president of the United States. Because in fact, she is stunningly unqualified, having never taken a position of consequence on an issue of consequence before she was selected in the last days of August. But she has now been put in a serious position to assume the presidency, and her selection is the clearest indication yet of the contempt that Senator McCain — transformed into nominee McCain — now feels for the process of governance.

More important still, however, is that nothing John McCain has done or said in this campaign would lead you to believe that anything the incumbent administration has done is simply wrong — just badly executed — and he’s saying that now only because public opinion has turned so radically against Bushism and all its works. And the ultimate price of his capitulation is to continue Bushism, in all of its manifestations. Not even the presidency should be worth that.

Not even the presidency is worth what it’s made John McCain do to himself.
[...] More than any other recent election, we are voting this year not merely for a president but to overthrow two governments. The one we can see is the one in which constitutional order has been defaced, the national spirit degraded, and the country unrecognizable because so much of the best of itself has been sold off or frittered away. The other one is the far more insidious one, a doppelgänger nation of black prisons, shredded memos, and secret justifications for even more secret crimes. Moreover, the current administration has worked hard not only to immunize itself from the political and legal consequences of the government we can see, but it has also worked within the one we cannot see in order to perpetuate itself.

For the past several months, it has worked to make extricating ourselves from the catastrophe it has wrought in Iraq as hard as possible. It has sought to make permanent the culture of corporate brigandage and predatory incompetence that it has made a hallmark of its stewardship of the country and its government. Salted throughout the vast bureaucracy are dozens of little homeschooled land mines, the products of a dozen cheapjack diploma mills selling patent-medicine history to the spiritually gullible. The fantastical hiring practices that only recently have come to light in the Department of Justice are only the most visible example of this, but the poisonous philosophy that has guided this administration is in all the institutions of the government Barack Obama hopes to lead. It is not dormant. It is there, replicating itself like a virus does in the cells of the body, waiting until it can erupt and debilitate him and his administration.
[...] There is no evidence at all that anything will change under a President John McCain… He has made brave noises about torture and the extraconstitutional prerogatives of the executive, but President Bush and his men went on and did what they wanted anyway, and McCain walked away, begging for votes from fundamentalists who hate him, meeping his displeasure in ways that were barely audible. The virus will gestate and spread on his watch, all throughout the federal government. Bushism must be ripped out, root and branch, everywhere it has been established, or else the presidential election of 2008 is a worthless exercise in futility. Barack Obama may not be the man to do it, but John McCain, for all his laudable qualities, clearly is neither willing nor able to do so.

To continue to govern ourselves this way is unthinkable. It is unsustainable as a democracy to continue to mock so egregiously in secret what we continue to profess in public. That is the task for the next president. That is the main reason to vote for Barack Obama of Illinois. We strongly encourage you to do so.