Among the multitudes singing hosannas for Barack Obama’s presidential
candidacy four years ago were a surprisingly large number of
conservative intellectuals, christened by the press “Obamacons.”
They included not just the usual dyspeptic libertarians who always threaten to bolt the Republican Party, but also men who had been at the heart of the conservative movement. There was Bruce Bartlett, a shaper of Reagan’s supply-side economics, who wrote about the Obamacon phenomenon for The New Republic. Count also Jeffrey Hart, speechwriter for Reagan and Nixon and for 39 years a senior editor at National Review, from 1969 until the magazine severed ties with him over his Obama endorsement.
They were joined by the blogger and Michael Oakeshott disciple Andrew Sullivan, foreign-policy thinker Andrew Bacevich, and a founding editor of this magazine, Scott McConnell. There was also a host of libertarians, quarrelsome and calm alike. The trend was so pronounced that in October 2008, Christopher Buckley (son of National Review’s William F.) began a column, “Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon.” He was promptly expunged from the magazine his father founded.
The very idea of Obamacons may seem odd now, a transient symptom of a GOP in ill-health after eight years of the widely unsuccessful Bush presidency. But the Obamacons are still around, and some intend to vote for Obama’s re-election. While they are a disparate group, there are threads that bind them: a fear of adventurism in foreign policy, alarm about national insolvency, disgust at the state of movement conservatism, and most especially a longing for political leadership.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/obamas-right-wing/
They included not just the usual dyspeptic libertarians who always threaten to bolt the Republican Party, but also men who had been at the heart of the conservative movement. There was Bruce Bartlett, a shaper of Reagan’s supply-side economics, who wrote about the Obamacon phenomenon for The New Republic. Count also Jeffrey Hart, speechwriter for Reagan and Nixon and for 39 years a senior editor at National Review, from 1969 until the magazine severed ties with him over his Obama endorsement.
They were joined by the blogger and Michael Oakeshott disciple Andrew Sullivan, foreign-policy thinker Andrew Bacevich, and a founding editor of this magazine, Scott McConnell. There was also a host of libertarians, quarrelsome and calm alike. The trend was so pronounced that in October 2008, Christopher Buckley (son of National Review’s William F.) began a column, “Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon.” He was promptly expunged from the magazine his father founded.
The very idea of Obamacons may seem odd now, a transient symptom of a GOP in ill-health after eight years of the widely unsuccessful Bush presidency. But the Obamacons are still around, and some intend to vote for Obama’s re-election. While they are a disparate group, there are threads that bind them: a fear of adventurism in foreign policy, alarm about national insolvency, disgust at the state of movement conservatism, and most especially a longing for political leadership.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/obamas-right-wing/
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