The thing about Hitchens’s “endorsement” of Obama is that it actually makes very little of a case for Obama, and mainly focuses on McCain’s temperment and Palin’s unreadiness. All he actually writes when it comes to Obama is:

Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience.

Hitchens is more of a contrarian than a liberal or conservative, and is great at stirring up a fuss and drawing attention to himself. I remember seeing him at a panel on terrorism in front of a conservative audience in which he started out offering a sharp critique of Islamic radicalism, but drew jeers when explaining that the War on Terror was a fight to defend secularism.