Limousine conservatives

Curt Mudgeon

October 2008

For having endorsed Obama’s candidacy earlier this month in The Daily Beast, Christopher Buckley, self-proclaimed conservative-cum-libertarian, resigned from the National Review.  I will not miss his contributions.  I had found his pieces lacking in substance, and his insistence on making every other line a display of his wit bordered on the irritating.  I must say that I am of those who prefer humour to wittiness.  The former is intended to make others smile, while the latter is a claim to cleverness.  Humour is self-effacing and Anglo-Saxon; wittiness is showing off and French.  William F. Buckley Jr was a very smart and humorous man.  By some strange turn of fate, his son has to be French, and that must be why he is endorsing Obama—the French are crazy about Obama, probably because they want our ruin.

Christopher Buckley finds Obama’s books to be “first rate” and marvels that the junior senator—a “rara avis”—wrote his own books.  He adds that the candidate has a “first-class temperament,” and, being a Harvard man, a great intellect.  So we should not worry about the junior senator getting in the White House.  You see, these qualities that Buckley uncovered are supposed to make Obama understand that the Democrats’ “traditional left-politics” will not work.  Rubbish!  The first-class temperament thinks that “when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.”  In an interview, he professed that he was more interested in the pursuit of “social justice” than in that of a healthy economy.  Buckley, his Yale intellect notwithstanding, must have missed his candidate’s puerile leftist views of economics and government, which certainly do not signal a stellar intellect, albeit from Harvard.

To try to justify his endorsement, Buckley invokes some change in Senator McCain’s temperament that occurred a year ago.  I claim that there was no such change.  I also claim that invoking that made-up change is a device to conceal the true reason for switching sides, which is Sarah Palin.  Her nomination—“not to belabor it,” as it is in itself so egregious—is mentioned in passing in the article as another blunder of the Republican candidate.  Then, there is that quotation of his father “[having spent his] entire life separating the Right from the kooks” that hints that the sanity of those who might disagree with him is questionable.  All this looks neither conservative nor libertarian.

The Daily Beast article refers to pieces by “conservatives” Kathleen Parker and David Brooks as additional supporting evidence of Buckley’s disapproval of Sarah Palin.  This begs two questions:  are those two columnists paragons of conservatism?  Do they know better than most who is fit to be nominated as Republican vice president?  I would assert that “No” should be the answer to both.  Parker and Brooks are conservatives of the sort that leftists call “moderate”, and that is why they write for the New York Times and the Washington Post.  Moderate conservatives are “fair” and acceptable to the left as the token, ineffectual opposition whose mere existence is supposed to make the intolerant appear tolerant.

Ms Parker blames Sarah Palin for “filibustering.”  Maybe she should read Obama’s speeches, which Mark Steyn strongly recommended, and see a true exemplar of how a lot of words can just occupy much space and time and mean nothing.  And since when did Ms Parker’s find in herself that sudden aversion to what she calls “filibustering”? Did she start paying attention to political interviews and speeches only last month? After declaring that Governor Palin is “out of her league,” she finished the hatchet job with the faint praise that the governor has “common sense” and that “her narrative is fun”—“narrative” is the word currently in fashion among scribbling hacks.  The gist of Ms Parker’s opinion piece is that Sarah Palin can “save McCain, her party, and her country” by … bowing out.  So far, the governor has significantly benefitted the McCain campaign, and the country likes her, even though she is not the sort of politician that Ms Parker would meet at cocktail parties or in her circle of friends.  I suspect that the worlds of Sarah Palin and Kathleen Parker have what set theorists call an empty intersection, a situation that the latter, wrong-footed as she was by McCain’s choice, cannot contemplate, let alone handle. 

Having read Ms Palin’s mind, David Brooks in an interview with the Atlantic could aver that she has “prejudices” against ideas, and he calls her a “populist” and “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party.”  Because I studied some foreign languages, I was able to translate that codswallop.  It means that Sarah Palin is not the kind of Republican that the New York Times approves of—Mr Brooks is, and that is why he is the paper’s “conservative.”  By contrast, Mr Obama, because of a conversation he had with the columnist about Reinhold Niebuhr, would represent a desirable kind of Republican, except that he is a Democrat.  It seems that to say something about Reinhold Niebuhr is a sign of “great intellect,” which dazzles Mr Brooks and makes him feel the same “tingle up [his] knee” that Chris Matthews pioneered—a rum way to get one’s tingles.  Why Reinhold Niebuhr?  Is it because the columnist recently discovered the theologian-cum-politician who, not unlike Mr Brooks, had a hard time deciding whether he was or was not a socialist?  Should a study of Niebuhr be part of a test of executive mettle?  Many of us, the unannointed, are less than impressed with Reinhold Niebuhr’s contributions to western civilization.  But we find those of, say, Karl Weierstrass truly brilliant.  We wish that Mr Brooks had asked the junior senator of Illinois about Weierstrass to see what the “great intellect” would have had to say.  But, as in the TV ads, there is more!  According to the New York Times columnist, the “great intellect” has “tremendous powers of social perception” because The One was able to guess a subtle yet entirely predictable trace of partisanship in an editorial.  Of course, The One would have ESP.  To those who may still have some doubts about the world of Mr Brooks, they can be assured that Mr Obama, not Mrs Palin, is part of it, so that impressively ethereal discussions of Reinhold Niebuhr’s concept of just war, not mundane debates about “spreading the wealth,” can take place at cocktail parties.

While the positions taken by Christopher Buckley, Kathleen Parker, and David Brooks did not surprise me a bit, I was somehow disappointed by Peggy Noonan’s jumping on the anti-Palin bandwagon.  I considered Peggy the most pleasant, if not most likeable, woman of the trade.  I knew that her conservatism has a few serious chinks, like her slipping into George H. W. Bush’s 1988 acceptance speech at the Republican Convention a statement about “[wanting] a kinder and gentler nation.”  This simple phrase, which somehow falsely implied that the Reagan administration embodied a sort of ruthless, brutal capitalism rubbed me the wrong way.  Well, literata Peggy finds that the governor of Alaska does not qualify as a vice-presidential candidate.  She stepped into it with both feet when, unaware of a live microphone, she told Mike Murphy on MSNBC that the Republicans had chosen Sarah Palin because “they went for this—excuse me—political bullshit [sic] about narratives.”  Ms Noonan then in a Wall Street Journal column asserted that “the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarisation in American politics.”  The important word here is vulgarisation—emphasis is mine.  It is the key to the attacks of all those pseudo-conservatives who find Mrs Palin’s experience lacking, but do not seem to object to the absence of tangible achievement or signs of potential leadership in Mr Obama’s life story.  In the same article, on the basis of observing seven weeks of campaign, Ms Noonan compared the governor to Harry S Truman, both having “come from nowhere,” lists the achievements of the latter, and decides that the former is unfit for office.  She perhaps is too young to remember how the press elites had ridiculed Truman: he was a hick, a common man, a failed haberdasher, a product of the corrupt Pendergast machine, he had no college education and mispronounced words, he was out of his league, and Roosevelt had picked him as a running mate for purely electoral reasons.  In fewer words, he was not fit for office.  Would history repeat itself?

The effete literati of the op-ed pages resent what they call the vulgarisation of American politics and the possibility that Sarah Palin might represent Joe Six-Pack.  They should perhaps be reminded that Joe Six-Pack, the common man who prefers beer and bourbon to Pinot Noir, has smarts, is proud of his trade, works hard, pays taxes, scaled the Pointe du Hoc in June 1944, and cleaned Fallujah in November 2004.   By voting, would he be the main contributor to the vulgarisation that the self-anointed scribes deplore?  I have met in my life many Joe Six-Packs.  I liked most of them.  They may not always make the right political choices, but the literati certainly do not do any better—as I remember it, many of them supported Carter in 1976.  Obama finds it funny that John McCain could be the candidate of “Joe the Plumber”—a lowly plumber?  Would The One believe that people like plumbers should have no voice in a presidential election?  Is it because they might not care a whit about Reinhold Niebuhr? 

It remains that Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber have injected in the McCain campaign that sense of reality that had been sorely missing from the beginning.  It is only after that Joe Wurzelbacher— Joe the Plumber—made Obama unveil the core of his politics and accurately identified it as socialist that John McCain dared use the word in his stump speeches.   It is Mrs Palin who brought to the fore in the campaign the absence of achievement of the junior senator’s career and his shady associations.  After the governor of Alaska delivered her acceptance speech at the Republican convention, Vince, my barber, looked at me in the eye and said that, at long last, someone had a chance to represent him in Washington.  I was surprised.  Vince, who owns his tonsorial parlour, has had an interesting life. He is a tough bloke whose political views can be summarised as “Republicans or Democrats, they’re all out to screw us and pick our pockets.”  He will vote for McCain, because Sarah Palin is on the ticket and he sees in her someone who knows and understands people like him.

Governor Palin was right in the way she contrasted the job of a mayor with that of a community organiser.  The former entails explicit responsibilities.  As a governor, she can also rightly claim to have more executive experience than Joe Biden.  Actually, she can claim to have more executive experience than   Biden, McCain, and Obama.  During her tenure, Mrs Palin led major projects and made important decisions.  The job of a governor considerably differ from that of a senator in that the former does not share the responsibility of his decisions with colleagues, cannot trade votes, and cannot hide dubious policy positions from the electorate. 

Politics is a huge business where money flows freely.  At this point of the presidential race, a total exceeding $1B has been spent by both candidates.  A large population of consultants, has-beens, scribes, and other hangers-on make a good living off it.  What makes a pundit or a political authority?  I noticed that many a political loser is granted television pundit status.  How could a Geraldine Ferraro be a credible Fox News political commentator, after a lacklustre stint in the Congress, a losing run on the Mondale ticket in 1984, and a failure twice to get her party’s nomination for the US Senate?  And what about Susan Estrich, also a Fox News contributor, who ran the pathetic Dukakis campaign of 1988 with its ridiculous episode of the candidate sporting a helmet and looking silly while riding in an M1 Abrams tank to show his interest in national defence?  In truth, many of these “pundits” are just political flacks who do not seek to inform but are pushing the party agenda.  They have no special talent, and they owe their jobs to the need of twenty-four-hour cable television channels to fill a schedule.

As to the pundits of the press, it seems that, after a few years of employment, boredom sets in, followed by a swollen-head syndrome, which causes a change in the function of the job from informing to shaping the country’s destiny.  The swollen head results from living in a bubble of self-conferred sophistication and superior wisdom based on heady connections with established politicians and their retinues.  To this little world, a politician is acceptable only if he is a Washington insider or fits the Washington insider’s profile and can have that special rapport with the bubble.  Sarah Palin, or anyone on the side of Joe Six-Pack does not belong there.  Ronald Reagan did not either. The way many “journalists” saw Reagan is typified by the words of one Nicholas von Hoffman—who remembers him?—who found it “humiliating to think of this unlettered, self-assured bumpkin being our president.”  Which is to show once more that forgettable scribes turning up their noses at men of substance is not new.

For all their sophistication, skill, and close connections with higher political spheres, Parker, Noonan, Brooks, Buckley, and their likes did not make Obama reveal the essence of his views on the rôle of government as “[spreading] the wealth around.”  But Joe the Plumber did by asking a simple question that the “pundits” did not care to ask or did not even think of asking.

All things considered, I believe that the New York Times would seriously benefit from firing David Brooks and hiring in his place Joe the Plumber.