What do Ken Adelman, Chris Buckley and Boris Johnson have in common?  They have all offered fairly unpersuasive endorsements for Obama that are really just indictments of McCain’s (and Bush’s) failures.  The Telegraph‘s Toby Harnden reasonably enough calls the Lord Mayor’s endorsement “silly,” but it seems to me that this may be the great Obamacon strength.  For months I have been railing against Obamacons with arguments that Obama is not who they think he is, that he is going to disappoint them, that his foreign policy and national security views are in most respects indistinguishable from the mainstream GOP that they dislike, which has made the crucial and fatal mistake of taking seriously their position as a pro-Obama position.  I kept saying, “The only conservative argument for Obama is that he is not McCain,” but I failed to see the implications of my own observation.  Conservative endorsements of Obama must necessarily be rather silly, because these endorsements have never been statements about Obama’s readiness but have been pointed statements about how unfit for the Presidency McCain is.  The endorser has to go through the motions of saying something positive about Obama, and so he says things that do not sound very compelling, because Obama is almost beside the point.  It is the act of endorsing Obama, or rather refusing to endorse McCain, that matters.  The sillier, the less persuasive the endorsement is, the more powerful its ridicule of McCain.  It is as if to say, “I can’t think of any really good reasons to vote for this other candidate, but you are an absolute joke and so I am compelled to go with your opponent and I will come up with some pretext for it before Election Day.”  Obamacons cannot be defeated or refuted by their critics because their arguments have never needed to make sense; all that has been required is that they find some way to not support McCain, and very few people are going to fault them for that.