Wednesday, October 8, 2008

A Conservative for Obama

ATTENTION CAMDEN COUNTY DEMOCRATS!!!

The next time someone says to you that they’re going to vote for John McCain and Sorry Pallin’ because they’re good conservatives, show them this article by a True conservative leader. Since around the middle of Bush’s first term, I’ve been telling people that his crowd are not conservatives, they’re right wing ideologues, and there’s a huge difference. True conservatives have a positive slant to their beliefs and their messages. Ideologues always, always, bring a message of fear and intolerance. Now, even true conservatives have had enough of the drivel that spills out of the neocons of 2008. Wick Alison is not just any conservative. He is the editor in chief of the National Review, the leading conservative publication for many decades. So please read the editorial below, absorb its points, and carry the message to any friends you may have that claims to be a conservative.
Dave Southern
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Subject: The National Review's Editor Endorses Obama
A Conservative for Obama

My party has slipped its moorings. It's time for a true pragmatist to lead the country.
by Wick Allison, Editor In Chief, The National Review

THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT "the most liberal member of the U.S.
Senate," the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no
political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why
I am a conservative and what it means to me.
In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for
Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the
conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was
invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I
later became its publisher.

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a
recognition of the fallibility of man and of man's institutions.
Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it
represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the
benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of
time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes,
doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to
test any political program against actual results.

Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of "oughts." We ought to do
this or that because it's the right thing to do, regardless of whether it
works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling
good rather than doing good.

But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political
programs when they clearly don't work. The Bush tax cuts-a solution for
which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the
nation went to war-led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in
the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his "conservative"
credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that
once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of
government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using
conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity
about making the world "safe for democracy." It is John McCain who says
America's job is to "defeat evil," a theological expansion of the nation's
mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced
financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral
authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make
worse.

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the
maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still
hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the
ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on
many issues. But those don't matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a
deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama's books (which,
it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without
realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me
comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have
a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as
McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an
ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am
convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American
national interests are directly threatened.

"Every great cause," Eric Hoffer wrote, "begins as a movement, becomes a
business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." As a cause,
conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a
complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the
instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.

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