Web exclusive: ‘Obama the conservative’ by Johan Wennström | Prospect Magazine
Right speech, wrong party.” That was the conclusion of a number of conservative commentators after Barack Obama’s celebrated performance at the Democratic national convention in 2004. This speech was very different from anything else delivered that night. Unlike many other Democrats, Obama used his moment in the limelight to send out a positive and constructive message about an end to the bickering of partisan politics; to the spin and cynicism that has defined political life in America since the 1990s. This is a message Obama has continued to spread in the run for his party’s nomination for president.
Obama’s hopeful non-partisan tone appeals to those conservatives who have been disillusioned by the polarising George W Bush presidency. After eight years with a leadership that has deepened the political divide in America, they long for a president capable of rising above the standard ideological fray.
The conservative blogosphere is currently flowing over with such comments, uttered by people who are tired of seeing their country torn apart by fierce arguments between the Bush and Clinton camps, and the cultural wars fought by the Christian right and die-hard secularists. These sentiments were recently summed up in an excellent essay in the Atlantic magazine by the conservative journalist and commentator Andrew Sullivan (known in Britain through his columns for the Sunday Times), where he came out as a passionate supporter of Obama.
The attraction of Obama to Sullivan and other conservatives is not surprising. In fact, their support is consistent with the constructive wing of the philosophy of conservatism. Those stuck in the world of divisional politics can be baffled by this. How, they ask, can people who admire Reagan and Thatcher also have time for Obama?
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9988
– – – – –
Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters, by Andrew Sullivan
At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce. …
Of the viable national candidates, only Obama and possibly McCain have the potential to bridge this widening partisan gulf. Polling reveals Obama to be the favored Democrat among Republicans. McCain’s bipartisan appeal has receded in recent years, especially with his enthusiastic embrace of the latest phase of the Iraq War. And his personal history can only reinforce the Vietnam divide. But Obama’s reach outside his own ranks remains striking. Why? It’s a good question: How has a black, urban liberal gained far stronger support among Republicans than the made-over moderate Clinton or the southern charmer Edwards? Perhaps because the Republicans and independents who are open to an Obama candidacy see his primary advantage in prosecuting the war on Islamist terrorism. It isn’t about his policies as such; it is about his person. They are prepared to set their own ideological preferences to one side in favor of what Obama offers America in a critical moment in our dealings with the rest of the world. The war today matters enormously. The war of the last generation? Not so much. If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man. …
It is worth recalling the key passages of the speech Obama gave in Chicago on October 2, 2002, five months before the war:
I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war … I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.
The man who opposed the war for the right reasons is for that reason the potential president with the most flexibility in dealing with it.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama