By most measures, I should be a ripe target for the group Bruce
Bartlett is describing in his New Republic article on the rise of the
Obamacons -- conservatives who support Barack Obama for president.
I am a conservative who mostly agrees with Bartlett's critique of
President Bush in Impostor. I am even less a fan of John
McCain. My disagreements with Bush and McCain extend to all the
usual areas -- immigration, campaign finance reform, the 2001 and
2003 tax cuts (where Bush was good and McCain bad), the Medicare
prescription drug benefit (Bush bad, McCain good), No Child Left
Behind, Sarbanes-Oxley, cap and trade, etc. I also oppose the Iraq
war and am not eager for a repeat with Iran. I spent my first three
years as a full-time journalist in seriously anti-Bush conservative
circles.
So I read Bartlett's Obamacons piece sympathetically but
ultimately didn't find many of the pro-Obama conservative arguments
terribly persuasive. In fact, many of them amount to the kind of
wishful thinking that would elicit laughter from these same
conservatives when applied to McCain or any other Republican. One
libertarian Obamacon is "convinced of Obama's sympathy for school
vouchers," a position for which there is far less evidence than the
Illinois senator's numerous campaign promises to increase spending and grow the
federal government. School vouchers are opposed by a major
Democratic constituency, teachers' unions, and not supported by any
comparable constituency in either party -- who is a first-term
president with a Democratic Congress more likely to side with, the
National Education Association or the Cato Institute?
Another libertarian Obamacon hopes Obama will scale back the
Patriot Act. That seems somewhat more realistic. But much of the
Patriot Act is rehashed from Clinton-era anti-terrorism bills. This
is exactly the kind of issue Democrats tend to lose interest in
once they hold power, just like Republicans do with government
spending. Bartlett quotes Megan McArdle saying, "[Obama's] goal is
not more government so that we can all be caught up in some giant,
expressive exercise of collectively enforcing our collective will
on all the other people standing around us in the collective; his
goal is improving transparency and minimizing government intrusion
while rectifying specific outcomes." But that could be said of most
liberalism since the New Deal. The G.I. Bill, Social Security, and
Medicare were all designed to address specific needs rather than
explicitly "enforcing our collective will on all the other people
standing around us in the collective."
Other arguments are purely impressionistic: Obamacons like
Obama's style and his association with "pragmatists." Not only do
these arguments emphasize style over substance. They completely
ignore what to most conservatives would be downsides of an Obama
presidency --the Freedom of Choice Act, national health care,
liberal judges, a potentially larger tax increase than the
expiration of the Bush tax cuts -- and his associations with
leftists who aren't pragmatists.
To my mind, only three of the Obamacon arguments have force:
ending the war, forcing
conservative soul-searching, and the negative case against McCain.
For now, I'll address only the first: Antiwar conservatives are a
minority and one that mostly opposed Bush's reelection in 2004.
Perhaps their numbers and willingness to buck the party line have
intensified since then, but Bartlett doesn't provide much evidence
for this. Second, given that Obama's proposed Iraq exit is
conditional upon there being no "security vacuum filled with
terrorism, chaos, ethnic cleansing and genocide that could engulf
large swaths of the Middle East and endanger America," he might not
actually end the war in any meaningful sense.
Finally, there isn't much evidence that Obamacons exist in large
numbers at the grassroots level. Most polls show McCain winning
twice as much Democratic support as Obama wins Republican support.
In past elections, it has tended to be the least conservative
Republicans who have voted Democratic. Bloggers, columnists,
academics, and other conservative elites are important, perhaps
more so than the average voter. But if Obamacons are men (and
women) without a country, their "rise" won't have much impact on
the election.
I'd be interested in how the Obamacons answer these various
points.
topics:
Education, Trade, Health Care, Barack Obama, Social Security, Iraq, Iran, NATO, Immigration, Unions, Medicare
