Oct
10
More incoherence from the right (Updated)
October 10, 2008 | 9 Comments
Considering William F. Buckley’s own disenchantment with the Republican Party towards the end of his life, I doubt he’s really spinning in his grave over his son’s decision to vote for Barack Obama. But I am a little disappointed myself – not so much because he is voting for the Obamamessiah, but because his reasoning, like the reasoning of so many other “conservative” Obama supporters, is wretchedly poor.
For starters, he essentially admits to being a complete coward.
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.
What a wimp. Buckley doesn’t want to out himself in the pages of National Review because, aww shucks, he might get a bunch of emails. Aside from the cowardice of such a decision, it doesn’t really make much sense. Does he not think conservatives will find out about this? Do people like Chris Buckley, David Brooks and Peggy Noonan think that if they, sotto voce, express their disgust with the GOP ticket to a bunch of leftists, that somehow we will never hear about it? Indeed, it was the guy he replaced on the back pages of NR that spilled the beans. Speaking of which, replacing Steyn with Buckley is another reason I’m glad I did not renew my subscription to National Review.
I’m also getting a bit tired of the martyr act. Kmiec, Parker, and Buckley – pre-emptively, in this case – have all whined about the negative reactions to their awful decisions. Well, that’s life, get a helmet. As they say, politics is a contact sport, and if you can’t deal with negative criticism, find another job. While I abhor some of the over-the-top sentiment expressed to Kmiec and Parker (which I am sure was in no way exaggerated by either yeahright), I am willing to bet that it was a case of both being too thin-skinned to face the firing squad, so to speak.
Anyway, let’s get to the “substance” of Buckley’s concerns.
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?
You’ve got to be kidding me. This comes down to rejecting a guy because you don’t like the way he campaigned. That’s fine, up to a point. I thought that George Allen acquitted himself shamelessly during his 2006 Senate campaign. But, you know what? I still would have voted for the guy had I lived in Virginia.
I do think it is revealing that Buckley was a McCain supporter when McCain played the part of the outsider “maverick,” but he dislikes him now in part because he selected Sarah Palin to be his running mate. What it reveals is that Buckly is in no way a principled conservative. Once again, Palin’s selection reveals the fault lines in conservative thought. For elitist conservatives only marginally – or not at all – interested in social issues, Sarah Palin is indeed a blight on the conservative movement and the Republican party. Her lack of Ivy League credentials disgusts them – how dare such a representative of the unwashed masses dare poke her nose in important political matters. Maybe when she gets to reading some John Rawls we can let her in the club.
Of course, at least Buckley has some real good reasons for supporting Obama, right? Right?
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.
Where to begin? Well, at least Buckley is upfront with his intellectual snobbery, so I’ll give him that. It’s sort of peculiar that he uses Barack Obama’s Harvard education as partial justification for his views, but then immediately knocks down that argument by noting how elite education has not been a big help for our recent presidents. Also, at this stage in the game, I’m at a loss to understand why it’s so manifestly clear than Barack Obama is a first-rate intellect while Sarah Palin is a dottering fool. Sure, she talks with that “funny” accent, and she tends to talk in generalities, but where has Barack Obama displayed any keen insight? Brooks brought up his ability to regurgitate what some other philosopher wrote, but color me unimpressed. As someone who has interacted with a lot of other “smart” academic people, I will be the first to say that book knowledge is in absolutely no way indicative of worldly smarts.
For example, people have raved and raved about Bill Clinton’s supposedly massive intellect. He could read a book and remember every detail years later. Why, he could cram for law school finals the nigh before and get straight A’s. Excuse me for asking, but so what? I can remember details from baseball games played when I was nine years old, should I be the next GOP nominee? (And I’ll be eligible for the first time in 2012, by the way.) People seem to automatically assume book smarts translate into an ability to formulate a cogent philosophical worldview. Perhaps, but maybe that worldview is one we should all be running from. Karl Marx happened to be a smart fella, you know. But I never saw any evidence with Clinton, and I have seen no evidence with Obama, that either of them can translate book smarts into the ability to put together the pieces of the puzzle in order to formulate a clear philosophy. I would posit that Ronald Reagan, who attended a podunk college somewhere and who probably couldn’t memorize the contents of a law school textbook, was nonetheless more brilliant than either one of them in a meaningful sense of the word.
But I’ve run too far afield. Buckley acknowledges that Obama is a raving leftist, but he just puts it on faith that Obama won’t govern that way. Oh, sure, he will probably also have a left-wing House and a near filibuster-proof Senate at his back, but why should we assume any of his agenda will pass?
This is yet another amazing aspect of “conservative” support for Obama. This willful naivete is shocking coming from our supposedly enlightened brethren. It’s as though they just want to close their eyes and pretend that Barack Obama is someone else. After all, he talks so prettily, he can’t be that bad. How can someone trust the future of our country to such a man based on little more than a fool’s hope that he’s not a tenth as bad as he appears to be on the surface?
Folks, if people like Buckley, Brooks, and Kmiec have thir way, we’re going to have to have a very long intramural dialogue as conservatives. Maybe it’s not just the Birchers who need to be shunned from here on in.
Update: A Steyn correspondent puts it much more succinctly:
Reading Buckley’s explanation, I would summarize it as this:
If we view Obama’s past political alliances as mere cynical manipulation to advance his career and if we view his election policy proposals as just pandering to the electorate, then we can feel good about voting for him for President because of, ah , oh yes, his character.
In the comments here, Darwin also nails it:
Apparently unselfconsciously, Brooks and Buckley Jr. have both made essentially the same argument, “I agree with little the Obama says, but he’s ‘like me’ and so I’m supporting him on the theory that he can’t possibly mean to do anything as crazy as what he says.”
By the way, is anyone else seeing a connection between the conservative elite and N.I.C.E.?
Comments
9 Comments so far
The apple has indeed fallen far from the tree. The son of the man who would rather be governed by the first 9 people in the Boston phonebook than 9 members of the Harvard faculty extols the “virtue” of Obama’s Harvard education.
If Obama wins, there’s going to be one helluva fight in 4 years over who will be the Republican nominee. The eastern “elites” will push once again for Romney (who I can’t live with) or, if we’re lucky, Eric Cantor (who I can definitely live with), while those of us in flyover country will be fighting over whether to nominate Palin, Jindal, Huckabee, or someone else. Many will believe that Palin has earned her stripes, and I think she’ll be the odds on favorite to win the nomination. The elitists will once again balk. It’s going to be ugly and divisive, and I’m afraid Obama may be able to waltz to re-election against a divided GOP.
[...] Original post by The Cranky Conservative [...]
No surprise at all. Here is an article Buckley wrote in 2006:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0610.buckley.html
He left the Republican party some time ago. Buckley always struck me as having the style of his Dad with none of the brains.
This isn’t an endorsement for President of the United States. It’s an argument for Obama to be crowned as our new philosopher-king.
Take it from Canada. You don’t want a philosopher-king. Trudeau was the ruination of the nation. We went from pioneers to whiners in double time.
Apparently unselfconsciously, Brooks and Buckley Jr. have both made essentially the same argument, “I agree with little the Obama says, but he’s ‘like me’ and so I’m supporting him on the theory that he can’t possibly mean to do anything as crazy as what he says.”
I makes no sense at all…
It’s going to be ugly and divisive, and I’m afraid Obama may be able to waltz to re-election against a divided GOP.
Jay, you may be right, but then again, maybe we will witness 1980 all over again. Of course, it might become 1936, or worse, 1804.
The boy has a stick so far up his ass he must cough leaves in the fall.
Oddly enough part of Buckley’s decision was based on the pretty prose in Obama’s book which was most likely ghost written. So, if we can identify the ghost writer by November 4th maybe Buckley can vote for him.