The Neo-con intellectual icon has apparently decided that the long march of history has resumed. For him to endorse Obama in American Conservative Magazine has got to hurt.
Rational conservatives (yes, I know it seems more and more like an oxymoron every day) are abandoning the Republican Party now lest they forever be identified as part of the Palin-Quayle-Bush-Cheney wingnut crowd.
Fukayama gives two basic arguments for Obama, the first being the more interesting one:
As a general rule, democracies don’t work well if voters do not hold political parties accountable for failure. While John McCain is trying desperately to pretend that he never had anything to do with the Republican Party, I think it would a travesty to reward the Republicans for failure on such a grand scale.
The second is more garden-variety McCain bashing for the manic-depressive campaign, the Palin pick, etc:
McCain’s appeal was always that he could think for himself, but as the campaign has progressed, he has seemed simply erratic and hotheaded. His choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate was highly irresponsible; we have suffered under the current president who entered office without much knowledge of the world and was easily captured by the wrong advisers. McCain’s lurching from Reaganite free- marketer to populist tribune makes one wonder whether he has any underlying principles at all.
It is encouraging that thinking people, even ones who's thinking has been so wrong in the past, have woken up to the disaster of Reagan Republicanism as a long-term governing philosophy.
At a time when the U.S. government has just nationalized a good part of the banking sector, we need to rethink a lot of the Reaganite verities of the past generation regarding taxes and regulation. Important as they were back in the 1980s and ’90s, they just won’t cut it for the period we are now entering. Obama is much better positioned to reinvent the American model and will certainly present a very different and more positive face of America to the rest of the world.
Here is the link to his endorsement in the Nov. 3 issue on line:
http://www.amconmag.com/...