SOCIAL: sorry dad i'm voting for obama (Chris Buckley)

[Adrian.Cotter at sierraclub.org]

Chris Buckley,the son of the late William F

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


Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama
by Christopher Buckley
October 10, 2008 | 7:33am
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.


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