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Son Of William F. Buckley Explains Obama Support

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By CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 19, 2008

Novelist Christopher Buckley, son of the late William F. Buckley, recently endorsed Barack Obama on the Web site the Daily Beast. It resulted in his resignation from the National Review, the conservative magazine his father founded. Excerpts from his endorsement follow:

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It's a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They'd cut off my allowance.

Or would they? Dear Pup once said to me, "You know, I've spent my entire lifetime separating the Right from the kooks."

I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him.

McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were "jerks" (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam - his former torturers!

A year ago, when everyone, including the man I'm about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no - bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don't see a whole lot of anymore.

But that was - sigh - then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, "We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us." This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget "by the end of my first term." Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

As for Sen. Obama: He has exhibited throughout a "first-class temperament," pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he's a Harvard man, though that's sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days.

I've read Obama's books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I'm libertarian. I believe with my sage friend P.J. O'Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren't going to get us out of this pit we've dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him - I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy "We are the people we have been waiting for" silly rhetoric - the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

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