Jonah Goldberg wasn’t very happy with Bruce Bartlett’s recent New Republic piece surveying the Obamacons. The Liberal Fascism author complained that Bartlett included libertarians like David Friedman among the ranks of conservatives for Obama, and anyway Bartlett supposedly didn’t give good reasons for why these dissident conservatives like the Illinois senator. Actually, he did. Bartlett pointed readers toward Andrew Bacevich’s “seminal Obamacon manifesto” in TAC, for example, though Goldberg chose not to mention it.

Now the New Republic‘s Plank blog gives us another case for why some conservatives — or at least one conservative — support Obama. It comes from supply-sider Larry Hunter:

Since Bruce Bartlett has included me among the “Obamacons”–conservatives supporting Barack Obama for president–I think it is appropriate to explain to my friends, family, and colleagues (the only people in the world who might give a damn) how I can possibly support a candidate who proposes domestic policies (especially tax and economic policies) that are completely antithetical to everything I believe and represent everything I have devoted myself to opposing during my professional career in Washington politics.

The answer boils down to this: It is indicative of how much I value individual freedom and how profoundly important I believe foreign policy to be at this juncture of American history that I am enthusiastically supporting Barack Obama for president despite how profoundly wrong he is on economic and tax policy. (It also doesn’t hurt that McCain himself is only slightly less wrong on economic and tax policy than Obama.)

Moreover, as I have said in the past, Obama saying all the wrong things on taxes, economic policy, and health care doesn’t bother me for the same reason that Republicans saying all the right things on taxes, economic policy, and health care doesn’t excite me anymore–you can’t believe a word any politician says. From Woodrow Wilson, to FDR, to George W. Bush, they all said one thing as candidates and did exactly the opposite once they got elected. Ronald Reagan was the exception to the rule. Today’s candidates are know-nothings who will say anything to get elected, do anything to remain in office, and don’t consider themselves constrained by the truth. Hell, they don’t even know what the truth is in most cases.

My sentiments on Obama are best captured in the note a conservative friend of mine, Wendell Gunn, wrote Obama when he sent him a campaign contribution: “My contribution to your campaign is based on hope and change: my hope that you will change your mind on the tax and economic policies you are proposing.”

Read on. Hunter asks his candidate some tough questions about economics, but concludes that whatever Obama’s tax policies, “I will still support him for president if he can change the direction of American foreign policy and begin to restore the freedoms the Bush and Clinton administrations and their cronies in Congress took away from us in the name of national security.”

Goldberg isn’t wrong when he says of the Obamacons, “Some conservatives don’t like the war and don’t like Bush. They’re voting against the Republicans as a result.” What Goldberg really doesn’t get, though, is that the Obamacons are not simply voting for a liberal because they don’t like the “conservative” — in supporting Obama, they seem themselves as supporting the more conservative candidate, who may be liberal on economic matters and a whole host of other issues besides, but who will at least conserve our liberties and keep the peace rather than starting unprovoked wars. For these conservatives, even the supply-siders among them, conservatism means more than cutting taxes, drilling in ANWR, and dropping bombs on Muslim countries.