The son of William F. Buckley (founder of National Review and godfather of the modern American conservative movement) has decided—shock!—to vote for Democrat Barack Obama.
Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama
By Christopher Buckley
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? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do.
Dear Pup once said to me, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.”
I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”
As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you’re reading it here first.
As to the particulars, assuming anyone gives a fig, here goes:
I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times—I’m beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, “As I warned the world in my last column…”—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.
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! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.
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?
All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.
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.
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.
So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.
John McCain needed a breakthrough during Tuesday night’s debate. If he got it, I must have been watching the wrong channel. Yes, McCain definitely seemed more comfortable with the town hall setting than with the earlier debate’s more traditional format. And, for the first time this year, McCain articulated some semblance of an economic message. But none of this changed the trajectory of the race, which is increasingly headed in Barack Obama’s direction.
Going into this week’s debate, Obama held a 9-point lead in Gallup’s national tracking poll. That was his widest edge so far, and it marked 11 consecutive days in which the Democrat held a statistically significant advantage over McCain in the Gallup survey. State-level polls also show Obama pulling ahead — not just in every state that Al Gore won in 2000 or John Kerry won in 2004 but also in some key states that George W. Bush carried twice, such as Colorado, Florida, and Ohio. The contests in several other Bush states, including Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia, are now dead heats.
Heading toward the end of the second week of voting in some states — and with as many as one-third of votes nationwide likely to be cast early — this election is settling into a very bad pattern for McCain and the GOP.
What has happened? Veteran Democratic pollster Peter Hart, drawing on his latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey and on a focus group he recently conducted in St. Louis for the Annenberg Public Policy Center, wrote to his clients before Tuesday’s debate. “The reason we have reached an important inflection point in this campaign is that the economy is not just another issue being highlighted, but the issue in voters’ personal lives,” he told them.
The heightened economic and credit crisis has effectively changed the venue of this election to turf that is virtually unwinnable for a Republican presidential candidate. If voters are focused on the economy going into Election Day, the outcome will almost certainly favor Democrats. But Hart also said that if the public’s priority ends up being national security, Republicans not only could, but probably would, win.
“John McCain has lost control of the economic issue, and the debate over the financial crisis has made voters doubt him,” Hart wrote. “The economy is overwhelming all other issues.” He noted that 59 percent of voters cite economic issues as their greatest area of concern and that “these voters who consider economic issues most important are voting for Obama by 15 points. Also, McCain’s handling of the financial crisis has made voters feel less reassured about him — 25 percent more reassured, 38 percent less.”
Another important dynamic in recent weeks is that Obama, through his first debate performance, seems to have cleared a threshold, much as Ronald Reagan did in his October 28, 1980, debate with President Carter. In that encounter, Reagan took advantage of voters’ animosity toward the incumbent and his party. The former California governor went on to ride a wave of change that had eluded him until a sufficient number of voters felt comfortable with the idea of his being president.
Reagan’s background as an actor and his lack of congressional, Cabinet, or national security experience had given voters pause, but the debate allowed him to clear that hurdle. For Obama, his relative youth and lack of national experience, as well as his race, had worked against him until he projected a high level of intelligence and knowledge about issues in the first debate. He was also confident, poised, and sufficiently tough to persuade enough recalcitrant Democratic and independent voters to join ranks behind him. That’s when he began to pull away in the polls.
This contest is not over yet, of course. McCain needs something big to change the dynamics — something bigger than a kick-ass ad, a strong debate performance, or a misstep by Obama. If voters stay focused on the economy, this contest could soon be out of McCain’s reach. If their attention returns to national security in the next week or so, he could still come back.
CHICAGO – East Africans living in Uptown, Edgewater, Rogers Park and Hyde Park have some ideas about why their countrymen and women win marathons.
Many of them grew up in Kenya and Ethiopia and will be cheering, waving flags and hosting dinners for their compatriots in Sunday’s Bank of America Chicago Marathon.
Fast as the Kenyan marathoners are, Ethiopian Haile GebreSelassie owns the world record in the marathon, a stunning 2:03:59 set September 28 in Berlin. Gebrselassie is not competing in Sunday’s marathon.
Dr. Erku Yimer, executive director of the Ethiopian Community Association of Chicago in Uptown says he doesn’t expect any of the Kenyans in Chicago’s marathon to break Gebrselassie’s mark: “I doubt it,” he says.
There are about 10,000 Ethiopians in the Chicago area, says Yimer. He and a group of compatriots will watch the race somewhere on the course and wave Ethiopian flags.
Sisay Abebe, an Ethiopian and co-owner of the African Harambee Restaurant, at 7537 N. Clark St., says “When it comes to long distance we have a healthy rivalry between our neighbor Kenya and Ethiopia.”
He also believes Gebrselassie’s record will hold for now. “You can’t rule (the Kenyans) out, but this is just an amazing record.”
Kulafiyi Haji is a 15-year-old runner and student at Lane Tech High School. He was born in Ethiopia but lived most of his life in Kenya until coming to Chicago in 2003.
Haji, a 4:32 miler and cross country runner with a 15:26 best for three miles, will be rooting for the Ethiopians Sunday. He and Lane Tech teammates will work at an aid station, passing out water and Gatorade.
Haji says Gebrselassie will likely hold his record for a while.
“He’s a legend. I don’t think anybody will be able to break his time easily. I don’t think they’re going to break it this year, anyway.”
Long distance running is in “our heritage and our daily lifestyle as well as our educational curriculum,” says Symon Ogeto, of Hyde Park, a local Kenyan community leader and senior marketing coordinator at the University of Chicago’s International House.
He says Kenyan children play soccer, run cross country and often trek barefoot several miles to and from school over rough dirt roads.
Kenyans have won the Chicago marathon 11 times since 1998. No other country brings as many runners to this year’s elite field, with 10 performances faster than 2:10. Only Japan’s Arata Fujiwara can travel in the same pack.
In the women’s race, Berhane Adere of Ethiopia triumphed for the past two years and could do it again.
Ogeto traces the roots of Kenya’s international running success to 1968.
“Kip Keino was our first modern runner who did very well in the Olympics of 1968 in Mexico City, “ Ogeto says.
“He made us feel that winning was the right thing to do. And the fact that we come from a high altitude environment really made it possible for us to get to be very good. In recent times, the incentive for money has also made it even a little more competitive.”
An estimated 5,000 Kenyans live in the Chicago area, dispersed across various neighborhoods, according to an article Ogeto co-authored in the Encyclopedia of Chicago.
In 1998 Ogeto began organizing his Chicago area compatriots to show appreciation for the elite Kenyan runners.
A group of about 50 to 100 Kenyans gradually formed to applaud their countrymen and women during the marathon. They also host dinners for the runners, with home-cooked Kenyan foods, in private homes.
Jacob Sitati, 30, of Rogers Park, is a native Kenyan and a contractor for Allstate Insurance. He plans to entertain Kenyan runners in a post-race party.
Sitati thinks a combination of factors explain why they win so many marathons. “Number one is the training,” he says, the high daily mileage.
“Number two, we have to factor in the environment where these guys train in the highland areas of Kenya. I don’t like to get into the whole genetic component but I believe it also does play some role.”
Faith Chepkwony, 32, a healthcare worker from Oswego, is cooking and organizing a pre-race dinner for Kenya’s elite runners. Ugali, a corn meal dish, is one of the foods she’ll serve, along with greens and a stew with either beef or chicken.
“Mostly they look for the ugali because it preserves their energy and keeps them going all through the run, “ Chepkwony said. “It’s an African cake, I would say. They prefer to eat it when it’s hot.”
Kampen Egesa, 34, of Edgewater, co-owns the Kahawa House Coffee Lounge at 838 W. Montrose, and says ugali plays a role in helping marathoners.
“That’s the meal most marathon runners from Kenya would have the night before. That food holds you for a long time. It’s very rich in carbohydrate.”
Though Kahawa House Coffee Lounge serves AA Kenyan coffee and fusion panini sandwiches, ugali isn’t on the menu. Egesa says it might be in the future.
Egesa grew up in Kenya and trained for four years as a marathoner in a high school program there. He would routinely wake up at 5 a.m. and run about 15 miles, often barefoot on dirt roads, six days a week.
In 1992 in Kenya, he ran a marathon in 2:23:17, not quite fast enough to join a government-sponsored training program for runners.
Today he runs for recreation in Lincoln Park and gives training tips to runners who stop by the café. He plans to watch the marathon either on television or along Broadway in Lakeview.
Ajay Ekesa, 32, of Edgewater, Kampen’s brother and co-owner of Kahawa, ran his finger down a printed list of runners in Chicago’s elite field.
“Most of these runners are from the Kalenjin Tribe from the Rift Valley,” he says, and that’s why they win.
Kalenjins, reputed to be Kenya’s fastest runners, train at altitudes between 5,000 and 10,000 feet, where the air has a reduced concentration of oxygen, which helps to develop a more efficient cardiovascular system.
NAIROBI, Kenya — The pirates who hijacked an arms-laden Ukrainian tanker off the coast of Somalia threatened Friday to destroy the ship if no ransom is paid, their spokesman said.
The MV Faina is surrounded by U.S. warships, and a Russian frigate is heading toward the scene, raising the stakes for a possible commando-style raid on the ship.
“We held a consultative meeting for more than three hours today and decided to blow up the ship and its cargo — us included — if the ship owners did not meet our ransom demand,” Sugule Ali told The Associated Press when a reporter called the ship via satellite telephone.
“After three days, starting from tomorrow, the news of the ship will be closed. We know what to do next,” he said.
The pirates had said Thursday they were willing to negotiate their ransom demand of $20 million, after nearly two weeks of insisting they would never lower the price.
Pirates have seized more than two dozen ships this year off the Horn of Africa, but the hijacking of the Faina has drawn the most international concern because of its dangerous cargo — 33 tanks and other heavy weapons.
NATO ministers agreed Thursday that they would have seven ships in the area within two weeks. Six U.S. warships already surround the Faina off the central coast of Somalia, and helicopters buzz overhead daily. Russia announced it would cooperate with the West in the fight, and several European countries have said they would launch an anti-piracy patrol.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov has said that Ukraine does not want foreign countries to use power to take the ship. Most of the 20 remaining crew member aboard the Faina are Ukrainian.
“We are against a forceful scenario, we believe there need to be negotiations,” he said. “What is most important is people.”
SAN’A, YEMEN — Dozens of bodies washed ashore Friday in Yemen after smugglers threw nearly 150 Somali migrants overboard in shark-infested waters, the latest such tragedy in one of the most lawless stretches of ocean in the world.
The Gulf of Aden between Yemen and the Horn of Africa is notorious for Somali piracy.
The latest migrant deaths raised calls for NATO and U.S. ships to also act against human trafficking in the same waters off Somalia, a country where there is no government control and armed groups are rampant.
“It’s essentially the same problems that allow piracy and smuggling,” said Roger Middleton, an expert on East Africa at the Chatham House think tank in London.
Dire economic conditions and violence in Somalia drive the waves of migrants, while the general lawlessness that gives pirates a free hand also opens the door for smugglers.
About 32,000 migrants have made the hazardous sea journey to Yemen this year — 22,000 of them Somalis, according to figures from the Yemeni government and the U.N. refugee agency.
Smugglers are known to cram dozens of men, women and children onto small boats and often beat and abuse the migrants during the journey, which can take up to three days.
To avoid Yemeni patrols, the smugglers often dump their passengers far from shore and force them to swim the rest of the way.
In the latest instance, about 150 migrants departed Somalia on Monday, and when their vessel reached about three miles off Yemen’s southern Shabwa coast, the smugglers ordered everyone off, said Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Twelve of the passengers were put on a smaller boat to take them ashore, while the rest were forced to swim.
Redmond told reporters in Geneva 47 people were believed to have survived, but about 100 were missing and feared drowned.
Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin abused her power as Alaska’s governor and violated state ethics law by trying to get her ex-brother-in-law fired from the state police, a state investigator’s report concluded Friday.
“Gov. Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda,” the report states.
Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan’s refusal to fire State Trooper Mike Wooten from the state police force was “likely a contributing factor” to Monegan’s July dismissal, but Palin had the authority as governor to fire him, the report by former Anchorage prosecutor Stephen Branchflower states.
However, it states that her efforts to get Wooten fired broke a state ethics law that bars public officials from pursuing personal interest through official action.
Monegan has said he was fired in July after refusing pressure to sack Wooten, who had gone through an acrimonious divorce and custody battle with Palin’s sister.
Palin and her husband, Todd, have consistently denied wrongdoing, describing Wooten as a “rogue trooper” who had threatened their family — allegations Branchflower discounted.
“I conclude that such claims of fear were not bona fide and were offered to provide cover for the Palins’ real motivation: to get Trooper Wooten fired for personal family reasons,” Branchflower wrote.
The Branchflower report states Todd Palin used his wife’s office and its resources to press for Wooten’s removal, and the governor “failed to act” to stop it. But because Todd Palin is not a state employee, the report makes no finding regarding his conduct.
The bipartisan Legislative Council, which commissioned the investigation after Monegan was fired, unanimously adopted the 263-page public report after a marathon executive session Friday. About 1,000 more pages of documents compiled during the inquiry will remain confidential, the council’s chairman, state Sen. Kim Elton, said.
A spokeswoman for the McCain-Palin campaign responded by calling the investigation “a partisan-led inquiry” run by supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, but hailing its finding that Monegan’s firing broke no law.
“Gov. Palin was cleared of the allegation of an improper firing, which is what this investigation was approved to look into,” campaign spokeswoman Meg Stapleton said.
She said the Legislature exceeded its mandate in finding an ethics violation. “Lacking evidence to support the original Monegan allegation, the Legislative Council seriously overreached, making a tortured argument to find fault without basis in law or fact,” she said.
Rep. John Coghill, a Republican who criticized the handling of the investigation, said it was “well-done professionally.”
But he said some of the conclusions were judgment calls by Branchflower, and recommended readers should view them with a “jaundiced eye.”
Palin originally agreed to cooperate with the Legislative Council inquiry, and disclosed in August that her advisers had contacted Department of Public Safety officials nearly two dozen times regarding her ex-brother-in-law.
But once she became Sen. John McCain’s running mate, her advisers began painting the investigation as a weapon of Democratic partisans.
Ahead of Friday’s hearing, Palin supporters wearing clown costumes and carrying balloons denounced the probe as a “kangaroo court” and a “three-ring circus” led by supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.
The state senator managing the probe, Sen. Hollis French, fueled those complaints with a September 2 interview in which he warned the inquiry could yield an “October Surprise” for the GOP. But Palin’s lawyers already had begun pushing for the state Personnel Board to launch its own investigation, calling it the proper legal venue for the matter.
