[Vision2020] William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama

[Chasuk]

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

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

Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama

by Christopher Buckley

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.

Dear Pup once said to me, "You know, I've spent my entire life time
separating the Right from the kooks."

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.