A Conservative for Obama

[Heisenberg]

http://www.dmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?nm=Core+Pages&type=gen&mod=Core+Pages&tier=3&gid=B33A5C6E2CF04C9596A3EF81822D9F8E

A Conservative for Obama
My party has slipped its moorings. It’s time for a true pragmatist to lead the country.
Leading Off By Wick Allison, Editor In Chief

THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.

In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.

Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.

But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.

[SuspectCorner]

Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama

by Christopher Buckley

The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

Or would they? But let’s 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. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll 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. She’s 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 that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you’re reading it here first.

As to the particulars, assuming anyone gives a fig, here goes:

I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times—I’m beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, “As I warned the world in my last column...”—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.

McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.

A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don’t see a whole lot of anymore.

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, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s 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.

I’ve read Obama’s 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, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke 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 aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve 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.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-10/the-conservative-case-for-obama/

[Beast_from_East]

The rats are jumping ship!!!

[canters]

Sounds like he is more voting against McCain than for Barry. And, there is some disagreement whether Barry wrote his books........Bill Ayers is a smart man ain't he?

BTW, if I were Barry, I would hope no one reads his books..He is/was focused on race to the point of scaring us bitter clingers in fly over country.

Well, time to take a break from this site,,,I'll be in the basement cleaning my guns and reading my Bible.

[MetalHead]

Is that what...one vote?
Are you posting all that junk for only one vote?

Congratulations are in order,you got 1 vote.

[Trouble]

Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama

by Christopher Buckley

The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.




This doesn't surprise me. Christopher Buckley is a DeadBeat Dad. I'm certain alot of DeadBeat Dads that don't want to take financial or any other type of responsibility for thier own children will be voting for Obama. Hoping that Obamas socialist governmental programs will take care of their kid's for them.







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[Viper]

Gee this is unusual, a son disagreeing with his father. Where will it end?:banghead:

[dbair1967]

No true conservative would ever vote for Obama. I dont care how much someone dislikes McCain or Bush's 8 yrs, if you are a true conservative you have absolutely ZERO in common with Obama, and would never support many, if any of his political views or goals.

[BrAinPaiNt]

No true conservative would ever vote for Obama. I dont care how much someone dislikes McCain or Bush's 8 yrs, if you are a true conservative you have absolutely ZERO in common with Obama, and would never support many, if any of his political views or goals.

Most TRUE conservatives would not vote for W twice or McCain either.

They would have voted for Duncan or Paul in the primaries and McCain would not even be on the ballot right now.

So let's not go down the road about TRUE conservatives here.

[dbair1967]

Most TRUE conservatives would not vote for W twice or McCain either.

They would have voted for Duncan or Paul in the primaries and McCain would not even be on the ballot right now.

So let's not go down the road about TRUE conservatives here.

Thats not the point. The point was arguing that a conservative would vote for Obama instead of McCain (or those other minor party candidates that might be on the ballot Nov 4th).

On a similar note, I also dont understand how someone who was "independent" or considered themselves a true moderate would vote for Obama over McCain. McCain is definitely more in the middle when compared to Obama.

Not everyone who votes Republican is a "conservative". Alot of them are moderates, and those are the people that got McCain nominated.

[BrAinPaiNt]

Thats not the point. The point was arguing that a conservative would vote for Obama instead of McCain (or those other minor party candidates that might be on the ballot Nov 4th).

On a similar note, I also dont understand how someone who was "independent" or considered themselves a true moderate would vote for Obama over McCain. McCain is definitely more in the middle when compared to Obama.

Not everyone who votes Republican is a "conservative". Alot of them are moderates, and those are the people that got McCain nominated.

Maybe they will vote Obama because the McCain Camp has ran a pitiful race and he picked some hockey mom that can not answer simple questions.

Maybe they are tired of the mccain camp letting their audience sound like a KKK light group.

Maybe they don't think either are very good with the economy in it's state but would rather have Obama or see him as slightly better.

Maybe they are just tired of republicans and some of their idiot followers acting a fool.

Maybe they are sending a message to the current republicans...Shape up or ship the hell out.

If Obama wins, if the Dems gain control of both houses...Maybe then the republicans will start getting their act in order and running on issues instead of the rovian style tactics they have been using the last 8 years.

Maybe it is a blessing in disguise if Obama wins...because this current group of republicans (not all) have become a disgrace.

[REDVOLUTION]

Sounds like he is more voting against McCain than for Barry. And, there is some disagreement whether Barry wrote his books........Bill Ayers is a smart man ain't he?



Just think if Obama wins... Ayers gets to visit the White House with Obama as tour guide.

[MetalHead]

Maybe it is a blessing in disguise if Obama wins...because this current group of republicans (not all) have become a disgrace.

The only thing that can cure AIDS is death
Do not let the remedy be worse than the disease.

Oh the democRATS have fare a lot better right?
9% approval rating works for you?

[BrAinPaiNt]

The only thing that can cure AIDS is death
Do not let the remedy be worse than the disease.

Oh the democRATS have fare a lot better right?
9% approval rating works for you?

I don't like either...but thanks for posting.

[REDVOLUTION]

The only thing that can cure AIDS is death


Thats not true.


Furthermore... there is a cure on the horizon.

[Trouble]

Thats not true.

Furthermore... there is a cure on the horizon.



Presently, there is no cure for AIDS. Although there are drugs that can surpress HIV- the virus that causes AIDS and can delay the illness.



.................................................. .................................................. ....

[VietCowboy]

First you say there is a cure for AIDS and then you say a cure is on the horizon.

Which is it?

Presently, there is no cure for AIDS. Although there are drugs that can surpress HIV- the virus that causes AIDS and can delay the illness.



.................................................. .................................................. ....

we have not found a cure for ANY virus.

[MetalHead]

Thats not true.


Furthermore... there is a cure on the horizon.

Sadly,I'm talking today.

[REDVOLUTION]

I am not sure what effect you wanted to get by posting this:

The only thing that can cure AIDS is death



You could easily replace AIDS with the word LIFE.

The only thing that can cure LIFE is death

What does it mean really?

[yeahyeah]

we have not found a cure for ANY virus.
small pox...polio...meningitis