The white flag of surrender. Throw in the towel. Who would have thought.
This is from the Editor in Chief of the National Review throwing his support to Obama.
First George Will, now Natl. Review editor. The conservative movement is throwing McCain overboard!
A Conservative for Obama
*My party has slipped its moorings. It's time for a true pragmatist to
lead the country.
Leading Off By Wick Allison, Editor In Chief
THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT "the most liberal member of the U.S.
Senate," the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like
no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to
explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.
In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for
Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the
conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was
invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review.
I later became its publisher.
Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a
recognition of the fallibility of man and of man's institutions.
Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it
represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives
the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the
crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and
utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens,
and always ready to test any political program against actual results.
Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of "oughts." We ought to
do this or that because it's the right thing to do, regardless of
whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not
results, on feeling good rather than doing good.
But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political
programs when they clearly don't work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for
which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when
the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion
growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his
"conservative" credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile,
a movement that once fought for limited government=2 0has presided over the
greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism;
it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.
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.
Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia,
as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it
as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John
McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war
unless American national interests are directly threatened.
"Every great cause," Eric Hoffer wrote, "begins as a movement, becomes a
business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." As a cause,
conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments
in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the
instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.
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