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A Very Strange Respect

Over the years, Obama has carefully calibrated his political message, and he has won a grudging respect among some conservatives. In The New Republic, Bruce Bartlett, a Treasury official in the Reagan and Bush père Administrations, writes that “Obamacons”—libertarians, disillusioned neoconservatives, even a few supply-siders—have been pushed “into Obama’s arms.” In The American Conservative, Andrew […]

Over the years, Obama has carefully calibrated his political message, and he has won a grudging respect among some conservatives. In The New Republic, Bruce Bartlett, a Treasury official in the Reagan and Bush père Administrations, writes that “Obamacons”—libertarians, disillusioned neoconservatives, even a few supply-siders—have been pushed “into Obama’s arms.” In The American Conservative, Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, complains, “To believe that President John McCain will reduce the scope and intrusiveness of federal authority, cut the imperial presidency down to size, and put the government on a pay-as-you-go basis is to succumb to a great delusion.” ~Dorothy Wickenden, The New Yorker

Unintentionally, I think, this paragraph demonstrates perfectly how the “Obamacon” phenomenon is driven pretty much entirely by a negative and anti-Republican impulse.  I know I have made this point before, but this passage serves as an excellent example of what I mean, because even when Ms. Wickenden proposes to show examples of how Obama has won over conservative supporters she ends up demonstrating that Obama didn’t win them over, but rather that the Republicans have driven them away.  The “grudging respect” for Obama turns out to have no connection with Obama at all, except for the fact that Obama’s opponents are McCain and the Republicans.  His conservative admirers have been “pushed into his arms,” which implies that there is no respect, grudging or otherwise, but rather a desperate, necessary embrace of the other major party candidate out of sheer contempt for the alternative. 

Prof. Bacevich’s article is a powerful indictment of the GOP and gives the best account you could want for why conservatives should stop supporting that party, and it is only by the accident of the two-party system that the conclusion of this argument is that conservatives should of necessity, according to the argument, support the GOP’s major opponent.  Obamacons have taken the lesser-of-two-evils argument to an extreme conclusion that the Democrats are now the lesser of two evils, but in coming to that conclusion they are offering the most empty endorsement of the actual Democratic agenda that the candidate they are grudgingly supporting (but not necessarily respecting) will try to advance. 

This position must be incoherent, because it is equally true to say, “To believe that President Barack Obama will reduce the scope and intrusiveness of federal authority, cut the imperial presidency down to size, and put the government on a pay-as-you-go basis is to succumb to a great delusion.”  It must therefore come down to Iraq, so you have the single-issue antiwar voters on the right arraying themselves against the single-issue pro-life voters who will always line up behind the GOP no matter what for fear of the alternative.  The only meaningful difference between these two single-issue rationales is that the antiwar voters have a slightly better chance of being vindicated, because a new President will have the authority to withdraw American forces from Iraq, but all of that hinges on Obama not meaning what he says when he says that he will leave some forces in Iraq and that he is willing to return to Iraq to prevent civil war and genocide.

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