Christopher Buckley, You Were Wrong
In October of last year, many Conservatives and Libertarians were left mouth agape when Christopher Buckley, son of late William F. Buckley, Jr., announced publicly “Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama“. Buckley (the son) is one of my favorite writers. I greatly enjoy his writing style in his weekly columns, and his novel Thank You For Smoking is one of my favorite reads. Heck, one of my favorite quotes from it, “If you argue correctly, you’re never wrong” was the tag line for my blog back in it’s early inception. But this particular column read more as a reason why he was not voting for John McCain, than why he was voting for Barack Obama.
In his pandoring to Obama, it became clear that he had bought into the marketing that was the Obama campaign. Obama sold himself as a moderate, he sold himself as an individual that was intent on erasing party lines, one who was determined to bring transparency to the White House and Congress. Many moderates and conservatives bit hook, line, and sinker, completely ignoring the individuals he put around him and his voting record in office walking straight into a trap. (Admiral Ackbar was not pleased.)
As Brian Phillips of the itsfirstfridays podcast put it, “It’s kinda like having a bear trap in the middle of the sidewalk and walking straight into it going, ‘Nah there’s no way if I put my foot in the middle of it it’s going to close.’ That’s what it does. That’s what a liberal does. It taxes and spends outrageously.”
How did you not see this comming?
In what is essentially an apalogy or at least an admittance of pulling the wrong level in November, Buckley discusses our current economic situation and the direction of the Obama budget in his latest column ominously titled, “The Audacity of Nope.” Calling upon the late Gerald Ford, he quotes, “Just remember the apothegm that a government that is big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.”
What’s odd is that 4 plus months earlier, Buckley used this same quote right before he said,
“But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren?t going to get us out of this pit we?ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.”
The sub-text of his aside “(I pray…)” is the tell all. The audacity of hope is the equivalent of attempting to prove boldness by standing on railroad tracks and crossing your fingers that you won’t die when the train hits you. At some point one must recognize that realities of the world override grand gesture. A zebra doesn’t change his stripes, and a man that has spent his entire career as one of the most liberal politicians to ever grace the halls of Congress is less likely to see personal change than that which he promised to bring to the District.
