A “Conservative” Case for Barack Obama
Lee on Jan 13 2008 at 1:41 am | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Foreign affairs, Lee's Page, Uncategorized
It seems Daniel Hannan has been getting some email of the “what the heck is wrong with you?” variety over his support for Barack Obama. Today he argues that he’s thrown his support behind the rather vague candidate because of his policy vacuity and favoritism for style over substance:
Isn’t it possible to argue that we want a relatively supine president, at least in the sense that a strong legislature is preferable to a strong executive, and that strong states are preferable to both?
The Republican heyday was arguably the last three decades of the 19th century, when they controlled 14 out of 16 congresses and generally held the White House, too. The party of that era believed in building up Congress at the expense of the presidency. Who were the presidents of that time? James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Rutherford B Hayes. (Rutherford B who? Exactly.) Yet these were the years when the US grew from a weakling among nations to a colossus.
To put it another way, I’d rather have a president who was decorative than one who was over-active. And Obama is certainly decorative.
(The Daily Telegraph)
Never mind the fact that the congress is very likely to be retained by the Democrats in 2008, and that a weak president led around by Nancy Pelosi, isn’t something anyone right-of-center should dream of. But there is nevertheless a certain logic to this from Daniel’s point of view.
Daniel is afterall unpersuaded that Iraq is an issue of any real significance to the national security of the United States, and he is highly sympathetic to Ron Paul’s isolationist views. When you don’t need or want a strong foreign policy, you don’t need or want a strong presidency occupied by a sharp and experienced leader with loads of specific plans. The bigger the boob, the less the interventionism, you might say. Marshalling public and political support for an aggressive foreign policy is no task for a man more comfortable weighing the advice of image consultants than that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Therefore it might be an interesting political question to ask how many other current Republican Ron Paul supporters could be persuaded to vote similarly, were Obama facing an advocate of a vigorous foreign and national security policy.
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Why anyone who has even a single principled stance, would vote for Obama at this point in time is beyond me.