Well, Rich Lowry managed to get both hands on his keyboard long enough to type up a new column. I guess he ran out of pictures of Sarah Palin hovering over sexy, sexy dead animals. And J-Mart, one of Politico's finest minds, finds Lowry's case "compelling."
Charles Krauthammermakes the point rather more eloquently (of course), though he manages to undermine most previous conservative criticisms of Obama in the process.
The new conservative word of the day? Considered by some a more polite than uppity, it's ambition.
Honestly, it seems an odd word to choose. It was Senator Obama's opponent, Senator McCain, who once wrote in his book, and conveniently read it out loud for a book-on-tape:
I didn’t decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. . . . In truth, I’d had the ambition for a long time.
When discussing Obama, Lowry seems to suggest Obama is ambitious to carry out a far-left wing agenda -- perhaps. Or a pragmatic agenda -- maybe. It's all a deep, dark mystery. He also seems more enthusiastic about potential racial code than Krauthammer (well, it is "The National Review":
When McCain asks, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" it is taken as a desperate smear. But it’s a question even Democrats don’t know how to answer. We’ll find out with more certainty only if Obama is elected and has to make tough governing choices. Until then — no sudden moves.
I'm not sure who is supposed to not being making sudden moves here. Obama? Bein' sneaky and slitherin' through, committin' burglaries perhaps? Or is it his audience, who must stay still for fear of being shot? Who knows.
Krauthammer seems to take the more sober view that Obama has nothing but personal ambition to explain what he calls his "tolerance of the obscene":
Obama is not the first politician to rise through a corrupt political machine. But he is one of the rare few to then have the audacity to present himself as a transcendent healer, hovering above and bringing redemption to the "old politics" -- of the kind he had enthusiastically embraced in Chicago in the service of his own ambition.
As opposed to every other politician, who magically appears from nowhere and genuinely does represent a new politics? Or the other sort of politician, who climbs up through the machines and social ladders and then announces to the world that he's a slimy, self-serving product of "old politics." Sorry, Charles, what you call rare, I call every single successful politician I've ever met. They're all able to climb up through the nitty-gritty and announce convincingly to the voting public that they've come out unscathed. Perhaps you're upset that Obama is better at it than most.
I, though, unlike many others, don't actually doubt Senator Obama's ambition, nor do I particularly begrudge Senator John McCain's ambition. And to the disappointment of many, I find in Obama, like every other politician in the history of the world, someone who is willing to pay a little less attention their ideals occasionally when practical circumstances are more pressing. (I, like many, tend to believe "pragmatic progressive" is the label that best fits Obama.) And yes, of course John McCain has a very strong desire to become president.
Why do I know this? How have I, mere Anarchofascist, discovered that Rich Lowry and Charles Krauthammer are correct, that Barack Obama, as well as John McCain, are quite ambitious?
BECAUSE THEY'RE FUCKING RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT