Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama by Christopher Buckley:
I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column.
Why?
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.
What?
[F]or 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.
David Brooks (of all people) does a good job of explaining what is happening here:
[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.
Note the William F. Buckley reference in the Brooks quote.
Repeat after me: Sarah Palin represents a fatal cancer to the Republican Party!
Ignore some of the other idiocy Brooks is writing, at least until November 5, 2008.
Today, David Brooks amplifies and extends his remarks:
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.
* * *
The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone. The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.
The former governor of Michigan echoed these sentiments:
"He is not the McCain I endorsed," said Milliken, reached at his Traverse City home Thursday. "He keeps saying, 'Who is Barack Obama?' I would ask the question, 'Who is John McCain?' because his campaign has become rather disappointing to me.
"I'm disappointed in the tenor and the personal attacks on the part of the McCain campaign, when he ought to be talking about the issues."
But now, before we all go jumping into bed together (Eccchhh!) Christopher Buckley also writes this:
A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don’t see a whole lot of anymore.
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?
All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.
A marble bust? WTF? But whatever.
Whether John McCain was once a good man brought low by whatever reason (being brutalized by Rove and Dubya in SC in 2000 would be my theory on that) or whether John McCain was always a spoiled brat (see the current issue of the Rolling Stone for details) that question no longer matters.
I propose graciousness in victory with respect to those Republicans who broke ranks with John McCain, especially before the election. Although I surely have strong disagreements with Christoper Buckley and those disagreements shall remain, the manner in which we treated Germany and Japan after World War Two was far superior to the manner in which Germany was treated after World War One.
We cannot take anything for granted, and yet it appears the permanent Republican majority shall finally come crashing down. Thereafter, we shall need to work respectfully with those Republicans willing to admit the excesses of GOP rule while continuing to neutralize the kooks who will not make such admissions.
After all, regardless of how the pendulum swings there is not a "Red America" or a "Blue America" but only one "United States of America"