William F. Buckley's Son for Obama

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.

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.