Strength Through Silliness
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What do Ken Adelman, Chris Buckley and Boris Johnson have in common? They have all offered fairly unpersuasive endorsements for Obama that are really just indictments of McCain’s (and Bush’s) failures. The Telegraph’s Toby Harnden reasonably enough calls the Lord Mayor’s endorsement “silly,” but it seems to me that this may be the great Obamacon strength. For months I have been railing against Obamacons with arguments that Obama is not who they think he is, that he is going to disappoint them, that his foreign policy and national security views are in most respects indistinguishable from the mainstream GOP that they dislike, which has made the crucial and fatal mistake of taking seriously their position as a pro-Obama position. I kept saying, “The only conservative argument for Obama is that he is not McCain,” but I failed to see the implications of my own observation. Conservative endorsements of Obama must necessarily be rather silly, because these endorsements have never been statements about Obama’s readiness but have been pointed statements about how unfit for the Presidency McCain is. The endorser has to go through the motions of saying something positive about Obama, and so he says things that do not sound very compelling, because Obama is almost beside the point. It is the act of endorsing Obama, or rather refusing to endorse McCain, that matters. The sillier, the less persuasive the endorsement is, the more powerful its ridicule of McCain. It is as if to say, “I can’t think of any really good reasons to vote for this other candidate, but you are an absolute joke and so I am compelled to go with your opponent and I will come up with some pretext for it before Election Day.” Obamacons cannot be defeated or refuted by their critics because their arguments have never needed to make sense; all that has been required is that they find some way to not support McCain, and very few people are going to fault them for that.
Filed under: politics
Tiny correction Daniel. Boris is not the Lord Mayor, just the Mayor. The Lord Mayor is merely the Lord Mayor of the City of London – ie, the Square Mile, more or less.
This does nothing to diminish the essential accuracy of your post.
Conservative endorsements of Obama must necessarily be rather silly, because these endorsements have never been statements about Obama’s readiness but have been pointed statements about how unfit for the Presidency McCain is.
I don’t understand why you think it is silly to endorse Obama if one thinks that he would be a better President than McCain, even if one doesn’t care for Obama’s policies. Can you explain?
I mean, a voter’s only practical options are either McCain, Obama, or a refusal to participate (not voting, write in, third party candidate). Do you think that such voters should refuse to participate? Why isn’t “being better than the other guy” a sufficient basis for voting?
You’re still giving them too much credit, probably because you are loathe to attack them in unprovable bad faith ways. However, the reason they make the nonsensical pro-Obama arguments rather than sticking to reasonable anti-McCain arguments is that they want to be cool. Whereas not voting/voting third party is not cool, indeed it is the act of a weirdo who pointedly refuses to grant leftism the status it craves as the sane default center. The Obamacons grant leftism that status by voting *for* a leftist in their rejection of Bush-McCainism, rather than rejecting both sides. So they’re cool.
But also notice how liberal–really liberal, not fashion-conscious liberal–many of the Obamacons are in big ways. Eg, Buckley is libertarian; Kmiec, in one of his pieces, listed environmental despoliation and the separation of immigrant families as the two chief evils (along with the war) of the modern GOP; Boris Johnson, well, come on…
I wouldn’t rule out the desire to be cool and trendy among some, and I wouldn’t rule out a bandwagon effect. Obamacons do tend to be libertarians, and they have fewer problems with Obama’s social liberalism. They may even find it attractive. Kmiec serves as a good exception to the rule. Kmiec has had a devil of a time defending his support as a pro-life move; he would have been well-advised to explain his support in other terms.
“these endorsements have never been statements about Obama’s readiness but have been pointed statements about how unfit for the Presidency McCain is”
This may be a bit unfair. I suspect that for at least some unsilly conservatives it is McCain’s selection of Palin, and the very real possibility of her becoming president, that was/will be the deciding factor in their choosing to endorse Obama/Biden.
The numbers are in and Obama has already won. Boris is just fishing for a White House invitation.