Conservatives and Progressives Unity

Orange County is the birthplace of a number of conservative initiatives that have swept the nation. So one can imagine the sudden hush in the room when Scott Flanders, CEO of the company owning the Orange County Register, announced at a corporate staff luncheon his support of Obama for president. Flanders joins a nascent cadre of premier conservative theorists disaffected with the Bush administration. The advance of conservatives favoring Obama, aka the “Obamacons,” suggests a major shift in the national narrative and consciousness. Bush’s War in Iraq has led to a tactical realignment of leading conservative thinkers, progressive activists, young people, African Americans and new voters of all races. With Jerry Falwell’s former chief of staff Mark DeMoss predicting 40% of evangelicals may possibly line-up behind Obama, the Age of Reaganism may face its final curtain call this coming November.

While the pundits read the tea leaves to forecast the final voting ballots of former Hillary supporters, leading conservative theorists have begun to switch sides. As Republican policy advisor Bruce Bartlett, not quite an Obama supporter, observed, “those of us on the right who pay attention to think tanks, blogs, and little magazines have watched Obama compile a coterie drawn from the movement's most stalwart and impressive thinkers. It's a group that will no doubt grow even larger in the coming months” The Obamacons include several prominent conservatives in their ranks such as preminent neoconservative theorist Francis Fukuyama, Republican President Eisenhower’s granddaughter Eleanor Eisenhower, and David Friedman, the son of the father of free market economics Milton Friedman. As Bartlett added, Obama “has even penetrated National Review, the intellectual anchor of the conservative movement. There's Jeffrey Hart, who has been a senior editor at the magazine since 1968 and even wrote a history of the magazine, ‘The Making of the American Conservative Mind;’ and Wick Allison, who once served as the magazine's publisher.”

Opposition to the War in Iraq threads this group of conservatives together. Francis Fukayama argued how it was “very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point…The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration’s first term is now in shambles.” Andrew J. Bacivich, writing for the magazine co-founded by Patrick Buchanan, the American Conservative, condemned the Republican Party of Bush, Cheney and McCain for betraying conservative principles while “faux conservatives, especially those in the service of Big Business and Big Empire,” profit. Committed to limited government, Bacivich lamented the accelerated growth of a “massive inefficient federal bureaucracy” which increased spending by 50 percent to $3 trillion per year since 2001 and allowed the national debt to balloon from $5.7 to $9.4 billion but he especially abhors the undermining of the Constitution and the concentration of power in the executive branch under the guise of national security. McCain, the “candidate of the War Party,” Bacivich claims, would continue “the most disastrous of President Bush’s misadventures” and would perpetuate the War in Iraq. By Bacivich’s judgement, Obama’s commitment to end the war offers the most hope for a conservative revival. The War in Iraq represents the arrogance of the US in demanding the world meet our expectations without cleaning up our own house and the idea that the “the exercise of power abroad offers a corrective to whatever ailments afflict us at home.” Although Bacivich recognizes the liberalism of Obama, he believes Obama will end a failed war which will force us to be self-reflective—“as long as we refuse to see ourselves as we really are, the status quo will persist and conservative values will continue to be marginalized.”

Continued>>>

http://www.asianamericansforobama.com/home/2008/06/conservatives-a.html

*whistles "Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead"*