Elections

Christopher Buckley, a writer and son of William F. Buckley Jr., is leaving National Review, the conservative magazine founded by his father more than 50 years ago. He has resigned after saying in a column on TheDailyBeast.com that he is still a conservative/libertarian but he is endorsing Barack Obama for president. Why would this alleged conservative vote for Obama? His reasoning is… well… extremely unlikely:

As for Senator 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. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

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 and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic 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.

Ed Morrisey reacts to Buckley’s apostasy:

I, too, think that Obama has a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect.  Harvard and Columbia don’t just hand out degrees, and while some may claim Obama had help getting into these schools (without much evidence that he didn’t qualify academically), he certainly succeeded in both.  Obama also has a first-class bent towards statist policies and a tendency towards mob action, though, and that should be very concerning to anyone who claims — as Buckley does — to be conservative.  A presidential election isn’t a vote on IQ, and you can insert your own joke here about any number of American presidents.  It’s a referendum on character, but mostly on policy.

In this statement above, Buckley assumes that Obama will take a lesson from his meteoric rise in American politics while building a record as a lockstep liberal ideologue that he should … what?  Suddenly decide he can’t succeed as a lockstep liberal ideologue?  How exactly would Obama learn that lesson — from the endorsement of Buckley, Douglas Kmiec, and other conservatives who found John McCain’s moderate policy stances so objectionable that they now want to support a liberal?

Buckley resigned from National Review, saying:

Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted—rather briskly!—by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal…

So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.

The end line is particularly odd since he appears to be claiming that not just the Republican Party left him, but so did National Review as his new piece in the Daily Beast reads “Sorry Dad, I was Fired”. Rich Lowry sheds further details on this untruth:

Chris is up with a post at The Daily Beast, “Sorry, Dad, I Was Fired.” I’d like to clarify this “firing” business. Over the weekend, Chris wrote us a jaunty e-mail with the subject line “A Sincere Offer,” in which he offered to resign his column on NR’s back page and said that if we accepted, there “would be no hard feelings, only warmest regards and understanding.” We took the offer sincerely. Chris had done us the favor of writing the column beginning seven issues ago on a “trial basis” (his words), while our regular back-page columnist, Mark Steyn, was on hiatus. Now, Mark is back to writing again, and—I’m delighted to say—will be on NR’s back-page in the new issue.

As Morrisey went on to note: National Review has a specific mission, which is to further conservative thought, and they will find it difficult to do so while their writers are busily endorsing leftist ideologues for high office while wishing with no rational basis that they will magically morph into moderates.  I also think that Buckley’s reasoning is so weak here that he would have difficulty maintaining any credibility with National Review’s readers after this argument.

UPDATE: Flashback: Christopher Buckley tells conservatives criticizing McCain to shut up

Here he is on MSNBC talking about his resignation, for some reason chuckling and acting suprised that his resignation wasn’t rejected and also clearing his throat a lot…

Lowry also notes:

Just one other point: Chris says that his Obama endorsement has generated a “tsunami,” that e-mail at NRO has been running “oh, 700-to-1” against him, and that there’s a debate about whether to boil him in oil or shoot him. Chris is either misinformed or exercising poetic license. We have gotten about 100 e-mails, if that (a tiny amount compared to our usual volume), and threats of cancellations in the single digits (we never like to lose any readers, but circulation is way up this year). No doubt part of what upset these readers was the dim view Chris expressed of them in his first Daily Beast post. So it goes. It’s an intense election season and emotions are running high. We continue to have the highest regard for Chris’s talent and wit, and extend to him warmest regards and understanding.

On the mentioned sneering towards the reader Lowry mentions, Allahpundit comments as well saying “The gratuitous sneer about ideological diversity, as if The Nation or Salon was any better, makes me think his political leanings are a tad more nuanced than he’s letting on, but if that’s the case then he probably shouldn’t have been given a column to begin with”

UPDATE: The Daily Beast headline has been changed to “Buckley Bows Out of National Review.”