The son of William F. Buckley, the founder of conservatism’s flagship magazine, National Review, has endorsed Obama. Christopher Buckley cites the response to Kathleen Parker‘s column on Palin as the reason for endorsing Obama outside the pages of National Review.
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.
The elder Buckley may have spent his life separating the Right from the kooks, but the McCain campaign is doing everything they can to let the kooks know they’re welcome. Like David Brooks, Buckley seems to embrace, rather than resent, Obama’s intelligence:
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.
It is an appropriately skeptical endorsement. Far from believing that Obama will magically solve our current problems, Buckley seems to believe he’s simply smart enough not to be a total disaster. It’s sobering that after George W. Bush, that’s likely the criteria many people are voting on, no matter who they’re voting for, although I suppose, it’s not exactly unusual.
–A. Serwer
