Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. Its a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. Theyd cut off my allowance. Or would they? But lets get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: William F. Buckleys Son Says He Is Pro-Obama. I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention, but itll have to do.
I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call the bleeding obvious: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. Shes not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin a cancer on the Republican Party.
As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if thats quite the right word, suggested that Kathleens mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. Theres Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said You know, Ive spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks. I dont have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is hes no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground.
But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us. This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget by the end of my first term. Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?
All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.
As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a first-class temperament, pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, hes a Harvard man, though thats sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.
Ive read Obamas books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, Im libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. ORourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.
But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics arent going to get us out of this pit weve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.
Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy We are the people we have been waiting for silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-10/the-conservative-case-for-obama
Tags: Conservative republicans attack Sarah palin john Mccain Barack Obama Joe Biden vice president Keith olbermann the view
