Conservatives for Obama?

7 Responses to “Conservatives for Obama?”

1. Josh M.

   February 12th, 2008 at 2:15 pm

   If you anybody thinks that Obama has a Burkean streak, please read his autobiography, Dreams of My Father. Then think again.

   Hart’s endorsement isn’t so much of a shock, I think. After all, he did endorse Kerry in 2004.

2. Travis Prinzi

   February 12th, 2008 at 2:41 pm

   If it’s down to McCain and Obama (and it appears more and more that it will be), I’d give Obama a lot of thought. I wouldn’t be incredibly thrilled about it, but we could do worse (you know, McCain). My wife has read Barack’s most recent book, and she was surprised at some of the notes of localism she found there.

3. Conservatives for Obama

   February 12th, 2008 at 2:43 pm

   [...] Hart is a Burkean conservative was a speechwriter for Reagan and former writer for NRO (HT to De Regno Christi) Jeffrey Hart sat at his kitchen table in slippers, reading Barack Obama’s words aloud. The [...]

4. W.H. Chellis

   February 12th, 2008 at 7:51 pm

   Josh,

   I have not read the autobiography. I am far from thinking he is a Burkean. I do hear a Burkean “ring” at times. The thing about Burke is you have to ask the question, “whose Burke?”

   The Burke of Russell Kirk seems a different creature from the Burke of Jeffrey Hart.

5. Josh M.

   February 14th, 2008 at 10:19 am

   Sorry Pastor Chellis, my comment was general and not directed at you. I’m curious as to what the Burkean “ring” is though. Obama is a telegenic rockstar who is widely acknowledged as uttering nothing but platitudes.

6. W.H. Chellis

   February 14th, 2008 at 3:36 pm

   I am thinking of this post from Rod Dreher over at Crunchy Con:

   Tuesday May 8, 2007
   Barack the Burkean?
   I’m late getting to this (our issue of the New Yorker always arrives a week late), but last night I read Larissa MacFarquhar’s much-discussed profile of Barack Obama, and I’ve gotta say it only makes me more curious about the guy. Check this passage:

   Innocence, freedom, individualism, mobility—the belief that you can leave a constricting or violent history behind and remake yourself in a new form of your choosing—all are part of the American dream of moving west, first from the old country to America, then from the crowded cities of the East Coast to the open central plains and on to the Pacific. But this dream, to Obama, seems credulous and shallow, a destructive craving for weightlessness. When Obama, as a young man, went to Kenya for the first time and learned how his father’s life had turned out—how he had destroyed his career by imagining that old tribalisms were just pettiness, with the arrogant idea that he could rise above the past and change his society by sheer force of belief—Obama’s aunt told him that his father had never understood that, as she put it, “if everyone is family, no one is family.” Obama found this striking enough so that he repeated it later on, in italics: If everyone is family, no one is family. Universalism is a delusion. Freedom is really just abandonment. You might start by throwing off religion, then your parents, your town, your people and your way of life, and when, later on, you end up leaving your wife or husband and your child, too, it seems only a natural progression.

   So when it came time for Obama to leave home he reversed what his mother and father and grandparents had done: he turned around and moved east. First back to the mainland, spending two years of college in California, then farther, to New York. He ended up in Chicago, back in the Midwest, from which his mother’s parents had fled, embracing everything they had escaped—the constriction of tradition, the weight of history, the provincial smallness of community, settling for your whole life in one place with one group of people. He embraced even the dirt, the violence, and the narrowness that came with that place, because they were part of its memory. He thought about the great black migration to Chicago from the South, nearly a century before, and the traditions the migrants had made there. “I made a chain between my life and the faces I saw, borrowing other people’s memories,” he wrote. He wanted to be bound.

   Of course, in a sense, by choosing to leave his family and move to a place to which he had no connection, he was doing exactly what his parents had done, but, unlike them, he decided to believe that his choosing self had been shaped by fate and family. There was, at least, something organic, something inescapable about that. “I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone,” he wrote, “and that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.” Choosing was the best that he could do. In time, the roots would grow. He married Michelle Robinson, a woman who already owned the memories and the roots, who was by birth the person he was trying to become: the child of an intact, religious black family from the South Side. He took a job organizing a South Side community that was disintegrating but that he hoped, through work and inspiration, to revive. Later, rejecting the agnosticism of his parents and his own skeptical instincts, he became a Christian and joined a church. “I came to realize,” he wrote in his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” that “without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned at some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was free, but also alone in the same ways that she was ultimately alone.”

   And this:

   In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good. Take health care, for example. “If you’re starting from scratch,” he says, “then a single-payer system”—a government-managed system like Canada’s, which disconnects health insurance from employment—“would probably make sense. But we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that’s not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.”

   Obama’s voting record is one of the most liberal in the Senate, but he has always appealed to Republicans, perhaps because he speaks about liberal goals in conservative language. When he talks about poverty, he tends not to talk about gorging plutocrats and unjust tax breaks; he says that we are our brother’s keeper, that caring for the poor is one of our traditions. Asked whether he has changed his mind about anything in the past twenty years, he says, “I’m probably more humble now about the speed with which government programs can solve every problem. For example, I think the impact of parents and communities is at least as significant as the amount of money that’s put into education.” Obama encourages his crossover appeal. He doesn’t often criticize the Bush Administration directly; in New Hampshire recently, he told his audience, “I’m a Democrat. I’m considered a progressive Democrat. But if a Republican or a Conservative or a libertarian or a free-marketer has a better idea, I am happy to steal ideas from anybody and in that sense I’m agnostic.”

   Now, how conservative could Obama really be if his philosophical peregrinations always deliver him to liberal conclusions? Seriously. I appreciate the idea that policies that we associate with the Democratic party could actually serve socially conservative ends. But is that what Obama is all about? I’m not asking rhetorically; I’d really like to know. There’s a saying — “A long face is not a moral disinfectant” — that contains within it my question about Obama. Is he merely the same old thing in a new package, or is there something truly different going on with him?

   The talk, though, about how he concluded from his parents’ screwed-up lives, running farther and farther away from commitment, that freedom in that sense is a form of slavery, is fascinating. If I were to have an interview with Obama, I’d be far less interested in hearing what he had to say about this or that policy, and much more interested in his thoughts on rootlessness, modernity and how politics can — and can’t — address it.

   UPDATE: Bruce Bartlett, the conservative columnist, revisits a theme:

   Consequently, I anticipate that more and more Republicans and even a few conservatives are going to start looking at supporting one of the Democratic candidates. I suggested that Sen. Clinton may be the most conservative Democrat now running. But others believe that Sen. Obama may be acceptable because of his deeply conservative temperament, and some point to New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s excellent record of tax-cutting.

   The point is that there are better and worse Democrats from a conservative point of view. Those who prefer to go down with the sinking Republican ship may come to regret that they didn’t try to exercise influence on the Democratic nomination before the nomination was sewn up.

7. johandursula

   February 15th, 2008 at 7:47 pm

   I’m just shocked that folks who are conservative, and Christian no less, would even have to think twice about whether or not to vote for any liberal Democratic. I mean, this is beyond ridiculous, and in my opinion it is a classic case of the cult of personality.

   Obama is a great orator. WOW! Obama is “nice.” WOW! Obama wants “change” (whatever the heck that means). Great! But, what has he said? Nothing! What does he believe? Well, he is a classic liberal, more liberal even than Teddy Kennedy. And that is precisely why he has said absolutely nothing and has given us nothing but fine sounding platitudes wrapped in eloquence and charisma, with a poetic flare no less, with the occasional reference to some big government program, or an occasional reference on how he thinks America should lose the war against Islamic radicalism and leave a void in Iraq to be filled by Iran and other nuts. You see, if he spoke too much about what he really believes, well, no one in their right conservative, or even moderate mind would vote for him in a million years.

   All of this and yet, come to find out that there are some conservatives, and worse, some Christian conservatives, who might actually pull a lever for a guy whose views are as close to socialism, if not communism, that you can get without actually be called one. Incredible.

   Now, I can understand not being 100% for McCain. I can understand being upset at the utter failure of the Republicans as a whole, and their wholesale departure from their core principles to the point where, as McCain might say, “their spending has been worse than drunken sailors.” But is the answer then to vote for the person who says up front that they want to spend even more on big government programs (because, remember, more government is the answer…government is “MESSIAH!”). Yeah, that makes sense: lets vote for the charismatic and likeable socialist, over and against the guy who has demonstrated for over 25 years by his voting record that he is the polar opposite of that, and who, at the end of the day, is a fiscal, social, and economic conservative, albeit inconsistent at certain times. Yeah, let’s vote for the guy who speaks much about freedom, but whose core philosophical beliefs betray the true freedom spoken of by the founders of this country…yeah, lets vote for him over and against the man who, when he speaks about freedom, actually knows something of the price of freedom, who swore to defend that freedom.

   Then there is the monumental, titanic struggle that we are engaged in against Radical Islam and terrorism. I served in the Air Force for 21 years. I served in places like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey. As a matter of fact, I was there at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia when these cowards blew up our barracks with a bomb. We lost 19 people, many of whom I knew personally. The point is this: this is an enemy that the comfortable and cozy Starbucks crowd in our country today misunderstands at their own (and everyone else’s) peril. They simply cannot understand the reality that there are indeed people in this world so irrational that they strap explosives to their bodies and blow themselves up in the name of God. And, since their post-modern suburbanite minds have no category to file that reality in, they think that they can just keep sipping their lattes and that this enemy will eventually get tired of doing this irrational thing and go away. Take it from someone who knows a little something about this: they won’t. They will never stop. They will just keep coming. And not just one or two, or three, but thousands. That is the world we live in.

   This laissez-faire attitude toward this enemy is seen especially in all of the heartburn with the war in Iraq, to which I ask: where you back in 2003? Most Americans, and most democrats, supported the war. But, in typical lazy and impatient post-modern American fashion, once the going got a little rough, the cry went up to retreat. People lifted their eyes from their laptops and silenced their cell phones long enough to say, “Oh goodness, this is a little too messy. Let’s just leave.” Of course, this was after they had drank the koole-aide that had been poured into their cups from, yes, the LIBERAL media, who absolutely despise Bush and America for that matter, and decided to politicize something that should never be politicized: war. Now, granted, there was huge mismanagement of the war, which I abhorred. And the fact that the intelligence we used to go into Iraq was seriously flawed really stinks. I was in Turkey when the order came down to invade Iraq, and my family, along with approximately 1,500 other families stationed there, experienced some hardship as a result. But you know what: that’s just the way it goes. We went to war. We can either gripe and moan about it like a bunch of bleeding heart liberals, or man-up and do everything necessary to ensure victory.

   Instead, our country is weak, and it can’t stomach too much. This is the weakness that our enemies know that we possess, and what they are seeking to exploit. And, make no mistake, the best Ramadan present you could give them would be a democrat for President, especially if it was Mr. Obama, whose idea of victory is defeat, and who wants to be bring this “victory” into effect by pulling out our troops right now.

   So, you still want to vote for Barack? You, Mr. Christian, Mr. Conservative, still want to consider aligning yourself with the most liberal senator in the Senate? Ok. If the areas I mentioned above mean nothing to you, then consider this: the Democrats are hungry. You can equate the situation to the 1994 when the hungry Republicans gained control and entered into their contract with America, where they implemented a host of conservative ideas that a number of positive results. Take that, and just reverse it. The Liberals want their contract with America, and I can assure you it will look nothing like freedom. It will look nothing like protecting family values and protecting the rights of the unborn. It will look nothing like trying to ensure that America remains a sovereign superpower who does not cave in to some two bit thugs from the Middle East when the going gets a little tough. It will look nothing like truly empowering people to move from welfare to work, instead, it will be the welfare, nanny-sate in full force, where everything is socialized, to include medicine. As the saying goes, you think healthcare is bad now…just wait until it’s “free.”

   Okay, okay. Maybe that’s enough. how can you entertain for even one nano-second the possibility of voting for any of the liberal democrats, if nothing else considering their views on abortion. Not only do they favor abortion on demand, but, they all are in favor of the procedure known as partial birth abortion, where scissors are jammed into a baby’s skull and its brains are sucked out. I can understand one having reservations about McCain. But, he is most certainly opposed to that barbarism. And, if you vote for a liberal democrat, you are voting for that barbarism, because they will overturn the bill that outlawed that procedure, and they will appoint judges to the supreme court who hold very different values than you do.

   It’s time to turn the laptops and cell phones off, and put the latte’s down long enough and start thinking with a clarity. Stop succumbing to the allure of charisma and charm. History is filled with many such rhetoricians, who when elected, lets just say turned out to be something that the people didn’t quite bargain for.

   Blessings,

   John

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