Accepting - and endorsing - Obama

David Frum says he'll be voting for McCain, but he seems resigned to an Obama victory. Jonathan Kay goes even further:

With both candidates doing their best to pander to middle-class voters amidst the fallout of Wall Street's crash, the ideological stakes have vanished, or at least gotten very tiny, in the U.S. presidential election. And so I am inclined simply to pick the guy who is best-placed to restore America's political capital in the community of nations. By a wide margin, that man is Barack Obama.

Not that I think Obama walks on water. Putting aside his charisma and speaking ability, he is a conventionally left-wing product of an urban Democratic political machine — with all the sleazy personal associations that entails. But he is hardly the political anti-Christ that the right-wing blogosphere has constructed.

If you get your information exclusively from the most fevered conservative sites, which a disturbing number of my correspondents seem to do, you would think that Obama's first acts as President would be to sell Israel to Iran, put Jeremiah Wright in charge of the Commission on Civil Rights, free Mumia Abu-Jamal, and swear an oath of allegiance on the Koran. It's all quite ridiculous: Like every presidential candidate, Obama has been consistently tacking toward the center from the moment he declared his candidacy. Once in office, he will likely be a triangulator in the mode of Bill Clinton (a Democrat who, lest we forget, signed welfare reform into law, eliminated the deficit, bombed Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan, liberated Kosovo, signed The Iraq Liberation Act, and championed free trade).

[...]

On Afghanistan, moreover, Obama has arguably been even more hawkish — and adopted his strong position earlier — than John McCain. Given that this is where Canada has deployed its own small but hardy contingent, that counts for something with me.

I'm still on the fence (and, sometimes, think I'd vote for Libertarian Bob Barr if I lived in an overwhelmingly red or blue state). But for Canadian conservatives who support the mission in Afghanistan, the fact that a President Obama will be much more palatable to America's allies - who may, therefore, be more open to committing troops to the mission - is a strong point in the Democrat's favor.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at October 9, 2008 10:49 AM