Posted on 09/19/2008 7:23:31 AM PDT by Keltik
My party has slipped its moorings. It’s time for a true pragmatist to lead the country.
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.
Oh, Gosh, more “better red than dead” crap.
Calling Wick Allison a “conservative” is like believing in the “Easter Ferret”.
Stockholm syndrome?
Dementia?
What???
What a shame, the guy is only 60 and already suffering from the symptoms of advanced senility!
.....so the answer is to get in line behind the man who will use the power of government to drain the waters and heal the planet. In fact, it's already started!
Some "stance."
Please, words actually mean things ... Dewd, you are NOT a conservative and apparently never were.
Another “lifelong Republican”?
You learn something new every day.
.....so the answer is to get in line behind the man who will use the power of government to drain the waters and heal the planet. In fact, it's already started!
Some "stance."
Also, a real conservative would know that George Washington never had wooden teeth.
This was posted yesterday.
Granted McCain is no conservative and he does he have some points... but the failures are the result of Libs, “moderates,” and RINOS. Real conservative works eveytime it’s tried.
To argue that Obama is more conservative than McCain or even conservative at all is bizarre... he in no way believes or even resembles conservatism.
jw
Deriding the Bush tax cuts tells me all I need to know about this “conservative.”
I like this purge of liberals from the Republican party.
Thanks Hussein!
MSM: “Allison Cancels Out Rothschild”
A “pragmatist”....this is crap, Obama is not a pragmatis. Obama doesn’t know which end is up. To send him in against real world leaders would be total slaughter for us.
Real “Conservatives for Obama” wouldn’t fill up an SUV.
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