First there was the conservative Seattle Times endorsement of Barack Obama. Then the Stockton Record broke their 72 year streak of only endorsing Republicans to endorse Barack Obama (link has both Seattle Times and Stockton Record endorsement). Now Esquire magazine has chosen to endorse Barack Obama...the first time in 75 years they have endorsed anyone for President. Their reason:

As much as any other factor, we made this endorsement out of a determination that a continuation of the Bush era is simply unthinkable.

Their endorsement includes a great deal of criticism of Obama and how he has framed his message. But in the end it is definitive. Obama is the ONLY viable choice for President this year.

From their endorsement:

Esquire Endorses Barack Obama for President

We thought this election would be a serious fight over the future of this country, but only one candidate showed up...

In truth, though, 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.

They contrast this with the faded wreck that John McCain has become:

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...

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...

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.

They are fairly devastating on both candidates, but within Obama they see genuine hope and reason to believe he can begin cleaning up the mess Bush has made while they see within McCain nothing but lost hope, abandonment of hope, and a continuation of the mess Bush has made.