Christopher Buckley

I read the article with great concern and disbelief, that yes, Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, Jr., was going over to the Obama camp.  His father was the man who founded National Review at a time when socialism was advancing unchecked.  In the mission statement for the new magazine he wrote, “It stands athwart history, yelling STOP, at a time no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

The younger Mr. Buckley reiterated that he remains a conservative, so there must be a strongly compelling argument for his decision.  I braced myself to be knocked down by a wave of reason and swept out to sea, only to be fished out of the water by a passing Obama skiff, and hustled off to the voting booth where, I too, would vote for change I could believe in.  What happened next was anticlimactic. 

 Mr. Buckley begins by throwing Sarah Palin over the side, dismissing her as an error in judgment by McCain.  He’s entitled to that opinion, but this election has been chock full of misjudgments by all parties.  What about the top of the ticket?  Buckley goes on to extol the virtues of Senator McCain, and he speaks as someone with first hand knowledge.  However, all of his praises are in the past tense.  He says the campaign has made John McCain “snarly.”  As the final thrust of the argument he quotes McCain as saying, “We came to Washington to change it, and it changed us.”  Et tu, Christo?

Buckley thus made a plausible argument to stay home on Election Day, but I was waiting to learn what pushed the needle all the way to the other side.  The main points of the pro-Obama case were that Obama has a “first class temperament,” that he is intelligent and he writes his own books.  With these attributes, Buckley reasons, he will soon discover that liberalism won’t work; he’ll change his ideas and we will once again live in Camelot, saying that if he doesn’t, “he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.” 

It seems that Mr. Buckley is willing to go “all in” on that bet.  I’m not.  In the 20^th century only one President came right out of the Senate, with no executive experience.  That was John F. Kennedy, to whom Barack Obama is often compared.  Shortly after Kennedy took office we had the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a major embarrassment to the Kennedy administration.  Later that year, Kennedy met with Khruschev, without preconditions, by the way.  Does that sound familiar?  Kruschev mopped up the floor with him for two days, prompting Kennedy to say, “He just beat the hell out of me.  I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts.  Until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him.”  Two months later the construction of the Berlin Wall began, and the following year brought the Cuban Missile Crisis, where we came closer to nuclear annihilation than ever; after that began our greater involvement in Viet Nam.  Hope, Change, Charm, Temperament, Intellect, Harvard.  I’ll pass.  If for the first time in nearly fifty years we have no choice but to elect someone from the Senate with no executive experience, I’d rather have someone whose been around the block a couple of times, no matter how surly the old salt is.