Of Tempers and Temperament

With John McCain tanking, I have sometimes wondered why on earth am I still supporting him.

Giving it some thought, I come up with one answer: I know what I’m getting with the Arizona Senator. I don’t know what I’m getting with Barack Obama.

I know that I am getting a man that supports the environment and that tends to be more gay-friendly than past GOP nominees. I know that I am getting a man that has worked with Democrats and shunned his own party’s narrow interests to work for the national interest. I know that I am getting a grumpy and testy old man that deep down is a good and decent man.

I don’t know what I am getting in Obama. That’s not to say that he is a bad person, I just don’t know. He doesn’t have a long record. He has not done as much of the bipartisan work that McCain has done. In many ways, he feels like a blank slate.

If we were looking at résumés, then McCain probably has the stronger of the two. But we also tend to look at a lot of other things besides experience. The presidency is a mythic office. Unlike our British cousins who have a queen that represents all-that-is-the-UK and a Prime Minister that does the day-to-day grunt work, we Americans wrap both offices into one job. Obama has that mythic quality that befits the office. McCain doesn’t.

But myth alone doesn’t make one president, nor should it be what makes one choose who to vote for. There needs to be some “there” there to make that man or woman President, or else the myth then becomes a fantasy.

Christopher Buckley, the son of William F. Buckley has chosen to endorse Barack Obama. What is so odd is not his endorsement, but how he got there. This is how he describes John McCain.

I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times—I’m beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, “As I warned the world in my last column…”—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.

McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.

Then he explains that John McCain has changed:

But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “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?

Well, I agree with him on the Palin nomination, but aside from this, his reasoning seems rather odd. He spends a lot of time talking about the fine qualities of McCain over the last 26 years and then bases his decision on how John McCain has conducted his campaign over the last few months.

Yes, John McCain has thrown some elbows during this campaign (so has Obama), but is that what you should make a decision on: the topsy-turvy world of a campaign? What has happened in the last 6-8 months should not weigh as heavily as the last 30 years, but yet, Buckley does just that.

What’s even odder is why he is supporting Obama:

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

Buckley says nothing about Obama’s positions or his record. It would be one thing if those were the reasons he was supporting the Illinois Senator, but it is a whole other thing to vote for a man because he has a fine temperament.

What does that have to do with our current economic crisis or Iraq, or global warming?

But it gets better:

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

So, Buckley believes that because Obama is smart and has a good temperament, he won’t use the same-old lefty politics. On what basis does he make this judgment? There is very little evidence to back this up. It seems as if Buckley just has faith that Obama will run government in a bipartisan fashion.

Buckley sees a mythic character in Obama and fashions his hopes on this man. What Buckley doesn’t see is the man, and frankly, I don’t know what sort of man is he. Please note, I am not saying Obama is a good or bad man, I just don’t know who he is, because there is so little of a record about who this man truly is.

For me, I have to vote on what I know and not on vain hope. I know that McCain has worked in a bipartisan fashion and will continue to do so. It’s hard to support someone only on the hope that they won’t govern as a traditional liberal when their past proves that’s what they will probably do.

Some day a few years from now, I think Buckley and other Obamacons will find that Obama is not the man of their dreams. Hope is a good thing to have, but it should not be the only factor in choosing who gets to live in the White House.