Chris Buckley endorses Obama

In a Daily Beast column much worth reading, Buckley fils endorses Barack Obama for president. (Wow, he bears a frightening resemblance to his father, doesn’t he?)

The column isn’t very substantial or persuasive, I don’t think, though I agree with most of it. As I see it, the choice this fall is a choice between McCain’s foreign policy, which would be disastrous, and undivided Democratic leadership under the most liberal president in our history, which could but would not necessarily be disastrous. No one wins elections running on a platform of American weakness, of course, but John McCain shows not even the slightest recognition of the relative decline of the United States in the world. Neither does Obama, really, but his policies would squander less of what’s left of American power.

Say what you will about how well he writes and how well he speaks, Obama has basically no record of national service. He’s a blank slate, and if Bush policy hadn’t been so thoroughly disastrous that the mere mention of the word “change” (however intended) was enough to have people seeing the Rapture, he wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning a general election.

Neither McCain nor Obama has a governing philosophy, and neither has a coherent set of ideas. That’s dangerous, and it’s the last thing you want to see at a moment like this, when everything is up in the air. Being a “maverick” does not induce confidence, and it makes most politically conscious Americans think you’re itching to blow things up. Nor does “hope and change” really restore one’s faith when it seems to involve making different but similarly ill-advised decisions and hoping for the best.

I simply don’t have confidence in the leaders of either party to get us back on track. Domestic politics make it impossible to pursue a foreign policy in which we begin normalizing relations with powers we don’t like (Cuba, Iran) and spending our scarce capital more wisely in that department.

And domestic politics also makes it impossible to get our finances back in order. Truth be told, the $850 billion we just committed to spending on the financial bailout is a drop in the bucket compared to the $55 trillion we’re facing in unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare in the coming decades. The Republicans can’t solve that problem alone, and the Democrats don’t want to.

So while I understand the desire to bemoan the Palin nomination, dismiss the latter day McCain for turning into an inauthentic political calculator, pull the lever for Obama and call it a day, this isn’t the lever that flushes the Bush administration. It’s the lever that chooses its successor. And whoever he is, I wish I had a sense that he took my concerns to heart.