The media is all over Baroness Lynn Forester de Rothschild dismounting from her magic unicorn, adjusting her tiara, and telling her subjects that the guy raised by a struggling single mother and her extended family is an "elitist," but there's another endorsement, no less ironic, but far less ridiculous, coming from the former publisher of National Review. Via Kos, Wick Allison, the current editor-in-chief of D Magazine, explains why he sees Obama as the more conservative candidate:
Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America's job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation's mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.
This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.
Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don't matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama's books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.
Of course, a woman of the people like de Rothschild might read this and sniff, "Federalist Papers? How elitist." It's enough to make you collapse onto your canopy bed and weep softly.
--A. Serwer
