It hardly seems possible that William F. Buckley's son has endorsed Barack Obama.
And so it has come to this.
Christopher Buckley joins Ron Reagan, Jr. in defiling a great father's name and legacy.
Say it ain't so Christopher.
Oh, that's right, Christopher, you aren't Bill Buckley. And neither is Rush Limbaugh, Rich Lowry or Jonah Goldberg. And John McCain, apparently, deserves to be defeated, argues Christopher Buckley, because he is not Ronald Reagan. But then Ron Reagan isn't Ronald Reagan either.
Well, I feel pretty confident that Bill Buckley would not have embraced his son's endorsement of Senator Obama, or the weak reasoning that lies behind it.
Let me take a stab at that reasoning just for a moment before arguing that despite Christopher Buckley's failed logic, he still should not have been driven from the pages of National Review.
His major complaint against McCain seems to be that McCain has taken out negative ads against Obama. Well, even if this is true, why would this justify separating from the principles of conservatism by endorsing a socialist candidate who, after all, has associated with left-wing terrorists, bigots and Ted Kennedy, whose tragic health situation does not change a rather sordid political and personal legacy?
Beyond admiring Obama's cool media presence — and it ain't all that cool or deep if you ask me — what are the Obama credentials?
Well, moving on, Christopher B. complains about that horrific choice of Sarah Palin for VP. Do we recall Bill Buckley's most famous quip – that he would rather be governed by the first, oh, whatever the number names in the Boston phonebook than by the Harvard faculty? Does Sarah Palin not epitomize this common sense approach to government? Isn't Christopher Buckley really complaining that she is not Harvard faculty or elite Washington?
Sarah Palin is no lighter than Senator Obama, and she doesn't head the ticket and she at least embraces some of the basic conservative principles Bill Buckley annunciated with such profound effectiveness for 60 years.
No, Christopher's problem is that he runs with the elite liberal crowd and is not quite as tethered to the principles that his father cultivated and annunciated for so many years. And Obama, likeable or not, would arguably head the most leftwing administration in history with the most leftwing Congress in history.
While we are at it, Christopher, who sharply attacked President Bush, might show a little gratitude to the President for keeping his country from being attacked over the past seven years. I mean, if he is going to be blamed for natural disasters and a house crisis orchestrated in large measure by a Democratic Congress, can we at least acknowledge that he has put the fear of God into our terrorists enemies? I will.
But then there is the decision of National Review to remove Buckley from its pages. This is a mistake, not in keeping with the magazine's history. True, Christopher has sinned, but the more interesting thing to do would have been to conduct a forum — with Christopher making his case and then five or ten top conservative thinkers debunking it.
If John McCain could withstand five years in a Vietnamese prison camp, surely NR could have weathered a bit of fire while thoroughly disassociating with Christopher's admittedly tortured reasoning in endorsing Obama.
Buckley, Christopher, is right on one critical issue. Conservatives are struggling to find their moorings. But President Bush's struggles are largely rooted in his being faced with a variety of unprecedented issues — an attack on our nation, the worst natural disaster in our history, a vicious Democratic Party and media, and an economic crisis that he had little to do with and has done a reasonable job of trying to curtail.
The problem with the Republicans is that they are so quick to throw over their own at the first sign of turbulence or compromise. When Bush and McCain did the right thing on immigration, they paid a heavy price in the conservative ranks. (Yes, they are right on the issue and the hard right wrong, but leave that for another day.) And now Christopher Buckley wants to throw over McCain for, well, actually trying to counter two months of nonstop negative media by taking the fight to the Left. (Until I hear Obama publicly disassociate from eight years of vicious attacks on President Bush, I will not buy the notion that somehow the Republicans are more malicious than the Democrats.)
And then we have NR throwing over Buckley; how strange, because his political judgment isn't as strong as his literary flair. Fight it out and argue it out and then vote for McCain, not only because he is a good man with some sound conservative principles, but because his opponent, who also is probably a good man, is nevertheless too far left to govern our nation.
George
“When Bush and McCain did the right thing on immigration”
I can’t quite agree with you here, but I will admit that little has been said about how we got into this mess. We can trace the financial problems back to FDR and the sub-prime democrats. But where do the immigration problems come from? Was it Reagan? Let’s name names.
Ivan, I have long felt, right or wrong, that the right approach to immigration was first to establish a guest worker program that would have reduced the incentives for illegally immigrating. Bush has long supported this position. I have no problem with fierce enforcement of the law, but a guest worker program made sense and I really cannot figure the hard right opposing it — it is really a free market solution to what had been a serious problem. (some report it is less of a problem now with the economy withering.)
I would like to add a note as well to the Christopher Buckley issue. As some readers of this site probably know, I have almost completed a book length treatment of Bill Buckley’s exchanges with the left, Crossing Swords. I think it sad that Christopher referred to his father’s friendships on the left as an excuse to turn left. His father would have befriended Obama if he thought him a honorable man, but he would have embraced his candidacy only as a matter of personal privilege, not a matter of public principle. He endorsed Lieberman, who now endorses McCain. He endorsed Lowenstein out of friendship, and in a situation that would have caused minimal disruption to his worldview. Christopher’s logic is truly tortured.
As for other conservatives who have supported Obama, I can only argue that they are terribly misguided and I refer readers to Charles Krauthammer’s excellent column about Obama’s history of associations. Let’s follow the logic of Buckley and Wick Allison and others — McCain and Bush, who reached across the aisle to Democrats, are unworthy, but Obama, who associated with bigots, terrorists and radical leftists, is? You truly have to have a loose screw in the logic machine to reason this way.
And why Obama? Because he looks good on camera and doesn’t stutter? This gives him more credibility than a man who has fought tenaciously against excessive federal spending, who chose a dynamic conservative VP candidate, however green on the national stage, and who spent five years in a prison camp in Vietnam in the service of his country?
This rush to Obama is a cheap thrill for men who are themselves unsure of their own principles. President Bush’s record on the deficit is unfortunate, but he hardly did it alone. Democrats and Republicans alike, and the American public, are responsible. And in truth, but for the global economic crisis that can be laid as much at the feet of Democrats as Republicans (but probably not at the feet of any one group or nation), projections were that Bush was going to grow the nation out of the defict in due course, just as Clinton did, in large measure thanks to the tax cuts passed by Reagan and fiscal discipline imposed by a Republican Congress.
It is bad enough to be spoon fed non-stop Obama nonsense on every network, save FOX. But clearly a few conservative elites, looking for excuses to appear defiantly independent (did they study McCain’s example), are now rushing over a cliff to support Obama, a man they know virtually nothing about.
Should he win, I wish Obama nothing but the best. Unlike those who hate President Bush, and some on the right who demonize the Democrats, I feel no need to demonize Senator Obama. I also feel no need to patronizingly suggest that it is perfectly okay to give him a pass on behavior and types of associations that would have killed any Republican or conservative careerin the cradle. Obama seems like a decent guy, though like many leftists he is transparently opportunistic and decidedly wrong on critical issues. Bill Buckley did not rush to the left when times got hard on the right; he outlined a navigable course and then used his intellect to erect guidelights that would return conservatives home.
One other observation. Obama has enjoyed an advantage — he has the entire media establishment to do his dirty work for him, and McCain has only a couple of talk radio guys who — while overstated at times — are nevertheless trying to balance the scales. Even so, McCain has barely touched the issues that many of us feel are fair game, and he publicly faced down critics of Obama who were treading on misguided ground. Will Christpher Buckley and Wick Allison please provide the name of one Democrat, other than Joe Lieberman, who supports McCain (again) who has stood against his or her party for demonizing President Bush? Bill Buckley, who I am honored to say became something of a friend in his final years, was tough enough to face down the entire liberal establishment for three decades, almost single handedly in the mainstream media. But, alas, his son and fellow “conservative” Obama supporters, couldn’t handle the pressure for a few months. That is sad, but it is certainly no reason for the rest of us to commit ideological suicide. I will vote McCain proudly. And should Obama win, I will wish him well and fight him on any and all issues on which I disagree, and support him fairmindedly when I think him right. But I know where my anchor lies. Christopher, as a sailor, lost his moorings and NR should have forced him to to stay in their pages if only out of respect to his great and distinguished father.
…”True, Christopher has sinned,”…
Next time you claim that liberals have religion mapped onto secular thinking, look in a mirror when you say it.
Felix, don’t you know poetic license when you see it?
Obviously, I am using the term as applied in a narrow political context. Get a sense of humor.