Sunday, October 12, 2008

“William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.”


Thanks to Bayernfan for pointing to this essay. It deserves full marquee treatment, and is reprinted in its entirety. Photo credit: The Daily Beast.

---

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.

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.

7 comments:

  1. First off, what a beautifully written piece! I'm not personally familiar with the Buckleys, but WFB seems to have a lot of his pieces in the right order.
    I don't agree with jumping ship because a man who has spent a lifetime proving once and again what kind of man he is chooses to take political advice from his campaign advisors. I don't believe John McCain has had any kind of fundamental shifts in beliefs any more than I believe Barack Obama has. Barack is playing politics more than McCain in my opinion. He is significantly more moderate now than he was while trying to distinguish himself from Hilary in the primaries. He is finally distancing himself from one of the last vestiges of his socialist upbringing, although the final task of distancing himself from his former self will be his greatest challenge of all.
    Ultimately, I believe in a smaller government. In a time of economic challenge, it is not time for social experiments. It is time for the government of the people to act like the people and tighten its belt. It is time to make sacrifices, not misplaced promises.
    There is nothing patriotic about shutting up and "taking it" by paying a higher tax percentage. Percentages work out so that the people who make more pay more. The people who buy more pay more too.
    If you spread the wealth out equally right now, tomorrow morning there would be rich people and poor people. Next week there would be an even larger gap. 20 years from now, there would be the ultra-rich. Those people who found some way to offer products and services that people wanted more than their own money. Socialism is just an excellent way to create government jobs.
    I will vote for McCain this year and hope for better candidates in 2012.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Politicians from both sides typically move from the extreme towards the middle from primaries to general elections. Problem for McCain is that he shifted from being a moderate to the right in order to try and placate a base that didn't like him. In the end, he's alienating the moderates with things like picking Barbie Bookburner as his running mate and these ridiculous last second gasp negative attacks. Meanwhile, Obama has moved, slowly but surely, towards the middle and is now drawing the moderates and independents into his camp. Dare I say, he's looked presidential while McCain has looked lost.

    The people McCain has picked for his advisors and running mate show what kind of president he will be. These are the biggest decisions a candidate can make and he's failed miserably by most estimations. He's hired the same people who worked for Dubya and destroyed his run in 2000. What kind of leadership does that show?
    The enemy of my enemy is my friend? That's not exactly what the American public is looking for anymore...

    They can scream "traitor" and "kill him" at their rallies all they want. They can yell about socialism at the top of their lungs. Fact is, none of these tried and true Republican tactics are working this time around because people have grown weary of it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. BTW, Jake, you should avail yourself of WFB's writings at Destinations or the library. While I disagree with quite a bit of what he said, it's a wonderful reminder of the civil discourse Republicans and Dems, Conservatives and Liberals used to have. High minded thought, writing and discussion. Not the screaming heads we see on TV today. Although WFB did threaten to punch Gore Vidal in the face once..

    ReplyDelete
  4. Bayernfan, I share your view of WFB, and you barely beat me to the punch with respect to recommending Jake check them out.

    We've discussed it here previously:

    http://cityofnewalbany.blogspot.com/2008/02/last-of-dying-breed.html

    ReplyDelete
  5. They can scream "traitor" and "kill him" at their rallies all they want. They can yell about socialism at the top of their lungs. Fact is, none of these tried and true Republican tactics are working this time around because people have grown weary of it.

    Not to mention that the RePubs have never come close to delivering what they promise, though they've done such a spectacular job at myth selling that the fundamentalist attraction isn't terribly difficult to figure.

    A propensity for unyielding, non-evidence based "belief" is the only explanation remaining as to why anyone would still proffer the elephants as a step toward small government.

    McCain tried to act like a kook to attract the other kooks. When that didn't work well enough, he hired a genuine kook with more kook street cred to do it for him.

    Perhaps it would be easier to hide in a cave for a few days and then disappear into exile. They could elect him in absentia and he could rule from on high like Dick Cheney.

    From one burning Bush to another...it is indeed a tired routine.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "Ultimately, I believe in a smaller government."Jake
    What does that mean - smaller govt? I hear it constantly, but no one explains what they mean by that. Would it being meaningful to proclaim I believe in bigger government? Wouldn't the details kinda matter - like smaller - how?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Smaller government(extracted from the conservative pledge):

    "Do away with anything that I will never use. Do away with anything that I am done using and benefiting from."


    With tongue firmly planted in my progressive cheek.

    ReplyDelete