Obama will govern as a conservative

The irony of this election is that if Obama is elected, he will likely govern as a conservative. So Jon Meacham says. After all, unlike his opponent, he is a church-going,Christian family man.


The son Bill Buckley spoke of at the Plaza 23 years ago, the writer Christopher Buckley, has had an eventful autumn. After endorsing Obama on the new Web site TheDailyBeast.com, Buckley faced charges of apostasy from his father's old comrades on the right. He offered to resign his duties as the back-page columnist of the magazine his father created, and the incumbent editor accepted with alacrity. Aside from the vague "Hamlet"-like overtones of a son's expulsion from his late father's kingdom—and given the Buckleys' upper-class Catholic ethos, it is more Evelyn Waugh than Shakespeare—the incident is interesting because Buckley chose Obama for largely conservative reasons. The right, he believes, has lost its way, and he thinks "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."

I spoke to Buckley briefly last Friday. "My hope is that Obama will govern, in that dolorous phrase, from the center," he said. "I think his instincts are conservative—he is a churchgoing, Christian family man. If his family resembled Sarah Palin's family, can you imagine the howls from the right?" Buckley paused. "He will have to be an artful dodger, for sure. But he knows the country is basically conservative." It is something Obama needs to remember as the trumpets begin to sound—not for a Roosevelt or a Reagan, but for him.