Buckley is optimistic about Obama’s judgment and intellect — though as the passage below indicates, he understands that intellect isn’t everything:

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.

Read on.

We’ll start off with something I picked up from the Washington Monthly’s blog, where apparently  conservative book publishers are starting to gag on talk show host Hugh Hewitt’s less-than-psychic ability to see into the future:

In 2006, a few months before the midterm elections, conservative blogger/talk-show host Hugh Hewitt published a book on the drive for a “permanent Republican majority.” Soon after, Democrats won a sweeping, historic victory, and reclaimed the majority in both chambers.

In 2007, a few months before the primaries, Hewitt published a book on Mitt Romney and the prospects of a “Mormon in the White House.” Soon after, Romney blew leads in Iowa and New Hampshire, and withdrew from the presidential race after a surprisingly poor showing.

In 2008, Hewitt has a new idea for a book. It’s called, “How Sarah Palin Won the Election … and Saved America.” There’s a small problem: no one wants to publish it. According to a report in the New York Observer, Hewitt’s literary agent, Curtis Yates, has already given up on selling the book.

“The idea was to tell the story behind the effect that Sarah Palin has had on this election and how it is and why it is that she has basically turned the election around for McCain and why it is that she is resonating with so many people in the country,” he said. “The intent was to finish the book by a week after the election, and to have it out before the inauguration.”

Was that the plan regardless of who won?

“The book obviously presumed [a McCain-Palin victory],” Mr. Yates said, “but the theory was that her impact on this election will have a lasting effect regardless — that she’s not gonna go anywhere, that she’s just gonna be a figure in G.O.P. politics going forward.”

That’s the question isn’t it? Is Sarah Palin going to be a force in GOP politics in the future or the symbol of a of not just a failed campaign, but of a type of campaign that’s finally exhausted itself.

I think it’s safe to say that without Palin, McCain would be in even worse shape because instead of fighting it out for Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, Colorado, Florida, and North Carolina, we could add Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, maybe even South Dakota to the list of battleground states. Certainly this would be true if Romney (who I doubt was even seriously considered) or Lieberman were McCain’s running mate. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty would not have Palin’s problems in the sit-down interview format but it’s hard to see people getting excited over him. Palin basically gives the Republican base a reason to get excited about McCain, to even care about the campaign. The NRA would have never endorsed McCain yesterday if Palin wasn’t on the ticket.

To suggest that Palin herself can win the election for McCain  doesn’t say much about him but it does say a lot about conservatives like Hewitt who feel this way. Consider that the last vice-presidential candidate that pulled his ticket to victory was Lyndon Johnson.  I have my own thoughts on what Palin’s future and that of the GOP might be but, unlike Hewitt, I’ll use a little conservative prudence and until the returns come in and be fully studied before writing them down.

Should the secessionist movement in Vermont continue to grow and push the state towards successful locally based solutions to the issues facing our society, it would have the potential to undermine the legitimacy of the Democratic and Republican parties. Why should billions of dollars pour through the Department of Education if tiny towns can quite competently manage making sure their children get good educations without worrying about No Child Left Behind? And surely the average Vermonter would be far safer should the legislature withdraw the state from the National Guard system, and instead fund and equip the Vermont State Guard, which would not be required to participate in overseas wars without the express mandate of the legislature.

In researching my TAC article I spoke with Naylor about these sorts of issues, and the one thing he pointed me to as perhaps the biggest source of resistance to the SVR’s goals was what he called “Bernie Sanders Syndrome,” or the willingness of Vermonters to trust the federal government so long as they’re able to send the “right” people to it. (During the months before Vermont’s presidential primary, he told me, support for the SVR cause actually went down from the 13% that Cropp cites to something more like 11.5%: “All those left-wing liberals know,” he observed, “that Obama is the second coming of Jesus Christ, that he walks on water and can solve everything” - but as the campaign has gone on and Obama has capitulated on one issue after another “a bit of reality is beginning to set in now.”) Here’s what Naylor writes about this attitude in Secession, a new book just out from Feral House:

The real Pollyannas are liberal Democrats who believe that all we need do is elect the right Democrat president and all of our problems will be solved. They see political reform (such as campaign finance reform) as a panacea, failing to realize that, so long as the Congress is controlled by corporate America, there will never be any meaningful campaign finance reform. Since we have a single political party disguised as two, it matters not whether the president calls himself a Democrat or a Republican. The results will be the same. So, again, we reject this option.

Can they pull it off? There’s certainly a lot of work to do: the SVR has set a goal of 67% in-state support for their cause before they make the breakaway official, and even if they’re currently back up around 13% that still leaves a long way to go. And Jason Sorens, a political scientist at SUNY-Buffalo who researches separatist movements, told me that according to his models Vermont is actually a place where a push for secession is rather unlikely to succeed: such causes tend to flourish in regions that are populous and relatively affluent, though he does acknowledge that an especially dramatic ideological distinctness can help to make up for that. But keep a close eye on Texas, he told me: “If they stopped electing presidents and started feeling that they were more discriminated against or felt that the balance of power had shifted, you might start to see something different there.” The Obama effect, in other words, could very well cut both ways.

A hot topic, then, and one that’s not likely to go away any time soon: both Bill Kauffman and Christopher Ketcham have forthcoming books on the topic, and Sarah Palin’s tenuous ties to the Alaskan Independence Party certainly helped to get the issue in the news. Do give Cropp’s piece a read - it’s a perfect opportunity to distract your attention away from our increasingly silly election season, and to look instead at some possibilities that are considerably more exciting.

The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home.

What? At a stroke? Surely not even a child would believe such a thing. There is little doubt that a President Obama, in contrast to a war-thirsty President McCain, would improve America’s standing in the world, perhaps even dramatically. But it is deeply silly and hubristic to think that his elevation would instantly, magically cure the world’s anti-Americanism.

No doubt it is that kind of sentiment that moves many military men and women, particularly at war and facing a population back home who for years now believes our presence in Iraq was a mistake from the beginning. Let’s put aside for a moment that fighting for the rights of anti-war protesters was never why American men and women were spilling blood in Iraq.

Instead, let’s take a look at yet another example of how our Republican leaders value our so-called American rights and freedoms, and then ask, what exactly is it that we’re fighting for? Does Sarah Palin even know? Other than the freedom to assemble with secessionist movements, or practice a religion that indulges witch doctors, is she truly interested in defending the Bill of Rights, or is it just more “lip service”?

From the NYT yesterday (emphasis mine): The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, said Thursday that the committee would investigate claims by two military eavesdroppers that they routinely listened in on private calls home from American military officers, aid workers and journalists stationed in Iraq. (snip)

The two former intelligence officers, Adrienne Kinne, an Army reservist, and David Murfee Faulk, a Navy linguist, spoke Thursday to ABC News. They also were interviewed for a book on the National Security Agency by James Bamford, a former ABC producer and author of two earlier books on the agency, that is scheduled for publication next week.

Ms. Kinne and Mr. Faulk, both Arabic linguists, were based at Fort Gordon, Ga., where the N.S.A. has a large listening post focused on the Middle East. Ms. Kinne was there from 2001 to 2003 and Mr. Faulk was there from 2003 to 2007, Mr. Bamford said. (snip)

Mr. Faulk told ABC that he and his colleagues listened to “personal phone calls of American officers, mostly in the Green Zone, calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends.”

He said the eavesdroppers would swap recordings of intimate calls for entertainment. “At times I was told: ‘Hey, check this out. There’s some good phone sex,’ ” he said.

Mr. Faulk said that when another eavesdropper protested that they were personal calls and should not be transcribed, a supervisor replied, “My orders were to transcribe everything.”

Under so-called minimization rules, an eavesdropper who inadvertently picks up an American’s private call is required to cut off the monitoring immediately and not to transcribe or keep a recording of the call.

Ms. Kinne spoke of listening to aid workers and journalists. She said the calls had often involved “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”

It was unclear whether the intercepts the two former intelligence officers described were part of the program of surveillance without warrants that President Bush approved shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks. He and other officials said that program intercepted only calls of people believed to be linked to Al Qaeda. (snip)

Mark Mansfield, a spokesman for Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was director of the N.S.A. from 1999 to 2005 and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said he had never approved illegal eavesdropping. “The notion that General Hayden sanctioned or tolerated illegalities of any sort is ridiculous on its face,” Mr. Mansfield said.