It's happened: the end of the line for any substantial conservative support for John McCain. If you can't hold the vote of the son of the Patron Saint of the conservative movement, who can you hold?
(Besides the wingnuts.)
Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama
by Christopher Buckley
Christopher Buckley’s books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. His journalism, satire, and criticism has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Esquire. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Forbes FYI.
The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.
--snip--
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.
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UPDATE: Two paragraphs of original analysis? I'll struggle with the task, even with one hand occupied by the neurotic cat.
There's a great urge to chest-thump when we read such things. Another win for our side! We've made another convert! But in many of these epiphanies, it seems much less that they've been convinced by Obama rather than driven away by McCain. There's some of that in Buckley's article also, but mercifully, he has decided he not only feels betrayed by McCain, he also feels that Obama is the right man for this time. That's not a sentiment I have read in any conservative mea culpa. There's much out there of "Obama at least sounds sane," as if they were voting for him solely because he's not the one who'll hit the button because his Frosted Flakes were soggy.
We should be a little careful, then, about celebrating every single conservative who announces that they're voting for Obama because McCain is a whack-job. It's really damning with faint praise, and it doesn't serve us all that well. Let's take that guy who said, at today's McCain rally, that an Obama presidency would scare him. Would we want to claim him if McCain exploded at the next debate and used the N-word, and the guy decided that he couldn't support a xenophobe? Is that the sort of lackluster support we want?
Let's celebrate when we get an actual endorsement, even when it is qualified, as with Buckley. He would have voted for the "old" McCain, which doesn't speak all that well for him, but he is actually voting FOR Obama. Meaning that he supports Obama and what he stands for. He's not just not-McCain. Let's see if we can make converts with Obama's positives, not just McCain's negatives.