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    William F. Buckley's Son for Obama

    Posted:
    10/10/08
    Read all about it in Tina Brown's new juggernaut, The Daily Beast. Christopher Buckley, a successful author in his own right, started out this campaign as a McCain supporter. So what turned him away from the Arizona senator?

    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 his 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.

    To borrow Political Machine's term, what about "The Affirmative Case" for Obama?

    He has exhibited throughout a "first-class temperament," pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s most 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... ...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... 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 a great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

    Read the full piece here. This continues a micro-trend: Descendants of famous conservative figures who are endorsing Obama. Read Susan Eisenhower's (granddaughter of Dwight D.) here. And a few other Republicans disenchanted by what they've seen from McCain of late can be read here.


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    David Knowles

    A journalist, musician and novelist, David Knowles has covered politics at AOL for the past two and a half years...more

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