Thunder on the Right: Noonan, Buckley, etc.

Colin Powell just endorsed Obama for President. George W. Bush’s former Secretary of State says he was concerned by the intense negativity of the McCain campaign and by the Sarah Palin factor. He also gives a hoot about America’s “place in the world.” Deeming Obama a “transformational figure,” he anticipated he will be well suited to “reach out to the world.” Very Jeffersonian observation.
Powell follows a growing list of disenchanted voices on the “right” who have been been issuing pointed broadsides against their presumed side in 2008 politics. Consider recent stunning examples:
1. Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, in her latest Wall Street Journal column, Palin’s Failin’, excoriates this year’s discourse in a thinly veiled condemnation of the Republican strategy:

“More than ever on the campaign trail, the candidates are dropping their G’s. Hardworkin’ families are strainin’ and tryin’a get ahead. It’s not only Sarah Palin but Mr. McCain, too, occasionally Mr. Obama, and, of course, George W. Bush when he darts out like the bird in a cuckoo clock to tell us we are in crisis. All of the candidates say “mom and dad”: “our moms and dads who are struggling. This is Mr. Bush’s former communications adviser Karen Hughes’s contribution to our democratic life, that you cannot speak like an adult in politics now, that’s too austere and detached, snobby. No one can say mothers and fathers, it’s all now the faux down-home, patronizing—and infantilizing—moms and dads. Do politicians ever remember that in a nation obsessed with politics, our children—sorry, our kids—look to political figures for a model as to how adults sound?

Noonan lamely claims McCain won the third debate, but then launches into a devastating assessment of his running mate:

“[W]e have seen Mrs. Palin on the national stage for seven weeks now, and there is little sign that she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office…. She doesn’t think aloud. She just . . . says things…. [S]he has spent her time throwing out tinny lines to crowds she doesn’t, really, understand. This is not a leader, this is a follower, and she follows what she imagines is the base, which is in fact a vast and broken-hearted thing whose pain she cannot, actually, imagine….”

I hazard noting that while Palin revels in being a “hockey mom,” she ends up sounding all-too “hokey.”

“In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It’s no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism.”

2. Meanwhile, at The National Review, the once conservative “bible” founded by the late William F. Buckley, the earth has split open. First, columnist Kathleen Parker was so horrified by Palin (“If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself”) that she urged her to save face for McCain and withdraw from the ticket.

Buckley’s own son Christopher caused jaws to drop subsequently with his endorsement of Obama — and then resignation (firing) at the National Review (a publication that in my view was long ago hijacked by neoconservatives). In his Obama endorsement, Chistopher Buckley starts by praising the McCain he used to know, but then laments how he came to illustrate McCain’s own 1994 diagnosis of ills on the right: “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.”

“This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?”

By contrast, Buckley praises Obama’s “first-class temperament and a first-class intellect,” even as he prays (“secularly”) that a President Obama would avoid “traditional left-politics… to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves.” Still, Buckley concludes that, “We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November.”
3. Sarah Palin of course isn’t the first noose around McCain’s neck; the worse problem is his inability to escape George “W” Bush. The blockbuster movie, “W,” is going to drive that point home. Piling on to Republican woes is the largely favorable review of Oliver Stone’s satire by Scott McClellan, President Bush’s former speechwriter:

“Stone tries to play it fairly straight. Even if he misses the mark at times, he deserves credit for the glimpses of inner truth he provides, which can only be instructive, especially as we prepare to elect a new president….I think the average Joe just might find it entertaining and thought-provoking. I won’t go as far as to borrow a line from Bush 43 and say, “Heck of a job, Stonie.” But I will borrow one from Bush 41 and say, “It’s good, not bad.”

Parting thought: In Noonan’s oped above, where she frets about not knowing whether Palin was a Reaganite or a Bushite, she characterized the former as:

“a conservative whose principles are rooted in philosophy, and whose foreign policy leans more toward what might be called romantic realism, and that is speak truth, know America, be America, move diplomatically, respect public opinion, and move within an awareness and appreciation of reality.”

“Romantic realism?” I’m not sure what that is. Yet I’ll consider it if includes a fundamental Jeffersonian — American — principle, that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” is worthy of America. The days of “yer either with us, or ag’n us” ought to end.