The Portland Pie-Off Presidential Endorsement

The Portland Pie Commission is pleased to announce the endorsement of Senator Barack Obama as president of the United States of America.

What's more American than pie? Pie is egalitarian, diverse and a dessert for the common wealth. Pie is positive, pie is meant for sharing and pie brings people together. Pie is for change.

This past summer we helped put together the first ever Portland Pie-Off. This grass roots event brought together over 149 people and 49 pies for an afternoon of goodwill, community and good eats both sweet and savory. Call it community organizing if you will, but I think we can all agree, in an era of deep commercialism and negative campaigning, the Pie-Off owes its success to certain shared ideals and values and the hard work of all who participated. Community effort made the Pie-Off a success and it is this same community that has the will to band together for positive change in our nation.

For it's these ideas and values of this community commonwealth, be it free shared pie on a summer afternoon—pie for all!—or the guarantees in the Bill of Rights that we, as Americans own together. Barack Obama is a candidate that shares in our ideals that this great nation holds the common commitment to own our problems and differences and can and should work together for collective responsibility. In a sea of phony rightist rhetoric that protects the political and monetary interests of a few, seeks to limit freedoms, and builds its platform on tyranny and hypocrisy, Obama refuses to abandon the core of American civic purpose that has made our nation a great one.

We ask you, fellow Americans and pie lovers to vote for more pie on November 4th, 2008. We ask you to vote for Barack Obama.