Christopher Buckley to Vote Obama

Son of conservative scion William F. Buckley, Jr. has had it with John McCain and Sarah Palin, is voting for Obama and is not shy about it.

Writing in The Daily Beast, Buckley says:

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.

And while Buckley extols the virtues and service of McCain, he explains why he no longer thinks McCain is right for the job:

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?

And he tells us why he'll join many others from the right in voting for Obama:

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

[...]

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.

Would dear, old dad, founder of the The National Review (Christopher still writes for it), have cut off his allowance? Perhaps. But this Buckley is joining an ever-growing chorus of people on the right to shift away from McCain and vote for a Democrat for, in some cases, the first time in their lives.