Vote Obama

Really, it's okay. No one will be in the voting booth with you, no one will know. Follow your conscience, and Vote Obama!

This morning I am reading even more about conservatives and Republicans coming out in support of Obama. But do not allow this to ease the need to get out and vote. Keep the energy up, keep telling your friends to Vote Obama!

Although I disagreed, and often, with William Buckley, he said some things over the years that let me know he was focused on the issues, not just party lines. So here is his son, also conservative, going public with his Obama support. Christopher Buckley deserves as much respect as his father for this type of bipartisanship, when one deals with the issues you can see through the smoke clouds.

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.

Wow, it must take a lot of courage to come forward with that, knowing everyone will bring up your dad and your conservatism. This is exactly the type of leader we need in office, someone who can bring us together and focus on the issues, not divisive rhetoric. He even calls him, President Obama. Nice.

Another, respected and well-known conservative to endorse Barack Obama publically, is Christopher Hitchens. He wrote a piece called Vote for Obama recently, too.

"McCain lacks the character and temperament to be president. And Palin is simply a disgrace."

Obama comes across as more presidential, McCain just doesn't appeal that way to most Americans. Obama is igniting hope and energy in the people, McCain is just talking about "deregulation." We need a leader, not four more years of the same failed Bush policy minded folks in office.

William Kristol is another who has called for McCain to "It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign." As I've said, McCain isn't doing so good lately, and Obama is going to win!

Keep pushing hard for your candidate, and get the word out, Vote Obama! *thumbs up*