Doug Kmiec has endorsed Obama (via Sullivan).  My previous critiques of Kmiec’s pro-Obama arguments are here and here.  While I cannot get myself to the same point as others on the right have done, there was one section from Kmiec’s statement that seems entirely right to me:

Our president has involved our nation in a military engagement without sufficient justification or a clear objective. In so doing, he has incurred both tragic loss of life and extraordinary debt jeopardizing the economy and the well-being of the average American citizen. In pursuit of these fatally flawed purposes, the office of the presidency, which it was once my privilege to defend in public office formally, has been distorted beyond its constitutional assignment.

Such is the continuity with the administration that McCain represents that many Republicans and conservatives have concluded that it is better to make a tremendous leap of faith in backing Obama rather than perpetuate what we have had for the last seven years.  Powerline attacks Kmiec for incoherence, but someone sympathetic to Kmiec might argue that if “coherence” requires supporting the current administration in its open-ended conflict in Iraq and its record of usurpation it is better to be incoherent and in opposition.  Kmiec’s endorsement is evidence, very much like Prof. Bacevich’s article on Obama, of how awful the GOP has become.  It is so deeply distrusted, so loathed, by a significant number of conservatives that even a Democrat whom they know to be on the far left and in disagreement with them on almost everything has a better chance of winning their vote than the Republican standard-bearer. 

However, the Democratic primary voters seem to have given the GOP a reprieve from disaster.  Rasmussen’s polling in Nevada and Arkansas shows that Obama loses even more Democrats and liberals than McCain loses Republicans and conservatives.  In Arkansas, Obama currently receives the support of just 48% of the Democrats, and in Nevada just 65% of Democrats back him.  In Nevada, where Obama enjoyed an 11 point lead a month ago, he leads by just four now, while in Arkansas he trails by 29 (his Arkansas unfavs of 62 are almost unheard of).  While it may not be a very large sample for comparison, both Democratic winners in the presidential election in the last four decades carried Arkansas (and, yes, it obviously helped that the last two winning nominees were both Southerners and one was an Arkansan).  Being outpolled almost two-to-one there is a serious problem for the probable Democratic nominee in a state that just elected a Democratic governor in 2006 and is set to have an unopposed re-election campaign for Mark Pryor.  Even if we assume that Arkansas is now reliably a “red” state, the gap between McCain and Obama here is indicative of broader dissatisfaction among Democratic voters when 37% of Arkansas Democrats say they will back McCain.  But, by all means, let’s talk about how all of this doesn’t matter, even though it is the Democratic candidate who has typically polled better early in the year and seen his support evaporate in the fall. 

Update: John Tabin views Kmiec’s endorsement as driven mainly by anti-McCain animus, which is consistent with his previous pro-Romney sentiments.  An alternative way of looking at it is that Kmiec has shown a pattern of supporting the candidate who attempts to appear superficially and unconvincingly to be more conservative than he actually is.  

Philip Klein notes acerbically:

Kmiec argues that when it comes to radical Islam, “Senator Obama needs to address this extremist movement with the same clarity and honesty with which he has addressed the topic of race in America.” Of course, Obama’s failure to do so after more than a year of campaigning, has no bearing on Kmiec’s decision to endorse him.

Of course, it might be that Obama has no interest in approaching jihadism with the lenses of a Paul Berman (mentioned by name in the article) and may actually regard the entire framework in which we debate anti-jihadist policies to be fundamentally flawed.  Indeed, if anti-jihadism requires the sort of lame sloganeering that Romney used during the primaries, or compels us to embrace talk of “existential threats” and resurgent caliphates, it seems to me that anyone who wants to deal in reality would be inclined to take a different approach.  Kmiec’s quote is remarkable from another angle, since many conservatives (and not a few Democrats, if polls can be believed) seemed to regard the speech on race to have been anything but honest and clear.