I found a few interesting posts in Daniel Hannan's blog archives that are worth a read.
Don't worry. These are clearly not endorsements of Obama. It's worth noting that three of the four blog posts include an approving mention of Ron Paul.
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March 22, 2009:
October 18, 2008:
January 13, 2008:
Don't worry. These are clearly not endorsements of Obama. It's worth noting that three of the four blog posts include an approving mention of Ron Paul.
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March 22, 2009:
I won't disown Obama - yet
Several of you are pestering me to turn against Barack Obama. "C'mon, Tory boy", you cry, "still think he's the messiah?"
There's no point in repeating that my support for the man was faute-de-mieux, that I strongly supported GOP Congressional candidates and that, far from believing Obama was the messiah, I kept citing the millenarianism of his supporters as one of the main arguments against him. This is a blog, after all, and blogs allow no shades of gray. Once I had declared for him, qualified as my declaration was, I became an "Obamaniac" - which attitude, by the way, neatly demonstrates the with-us-or-against-us bellicosity that has put so many Republicans off their party.
So, have I changed my mind? Well, I won't deny that Obama has done plenty of irritating things, ranging from the idiotic stimulus package to the way he dissed the Prime Minister (yes, I know the man's a clot, Mr President, but he's our clot; and, tired as you may have been, I suspect the Royal Marines in their Forward Operating Bases in Helmand, fighting a war that few of your allies will touch, are pretty drowsy too).
On the other hand, the US remains more popular than it has been for years, and Obama's own approval ratings, though fallen, are well above the vote he received in November.
The only fair answer I can give is that it's too early to say. As Andrew Sullivan puts it in today's Sunday Times:
In an age of 24-hour news channels, millions of blogs and columnists vying to stay above the bloggerrhoeic tide, there is a real urge to make a clear and instant judgment.
I'm not going to do it, because, two months after a president has taken office in the middle of a global financial and economic crisis, as he grapples with two unending wars and a battered constitution, the whole idea of a definitive judgment is loopy. It's also likely to be wrong. If you had judged the last Bush administration at this point, you would have said it was much better than expected.
I can't put it better any better than that. Sorry, guys: you'll have to come back and ask me in few months' time.
October 18, 2008:
September 27, 2008:Why this conservative is for Barack Obama
This is going to be the single most unpopular thing I've ever written, but here goes. I hope Barack Obama wins on 4 November.
I haven't reached this view, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, "unadvisedly, lightly or wantonly". I am a lifelong Republican, and have, over the years, felt a far more uncomplicated loyalty to that party than to my own. I have been revolted by some of the attacks on John McCain and, even more so, by those on Sarah Palin. Conversely, I find the almost Millenarian enthusiasm of Obama's supporters unsettling: as Brian's mother tells the crowd in the Monty Python film, "he's not the messiah".
I'm aware that I am alienating my natural constituency. Several regular posters here, whose contributions I value, have come up with compelling arguments for McCain. So apologies to Caroline Hope, Maddie, Daniel1979, Sheumais, Sheona, GG, Jayne and Jonathan Wilson. Apologies to the always courteous Fernandez, and to Christopher, late of California, now aus Trier. Apologies to Stephanie, whose fetching avatar never fails to cheer me up. Apologies to that untiring bulldog Donal Blaney, and to Tim Montgomerie, the most influential Tory on the net. Perhaps I might even, in due course, seek absolution from the shade of Archbishop Cranmer, to whose erudite blog I turn every morning with a sense of pleasant anticipation.
If it's any consolation, guys, my wife is on your side. I have mentioned before that, being less political than her husband, Mrs H is a far better conservative. As she sees it, John McCain is a brave man and Sarah Palin a God-fearing woman, and both are better than their critics. With such a weight of opinion against me, I had been having second thoughts. So this morning, I went for a long swim in the cold, velvety waters of the English Channel and pondered the matter. By the time I scrunched back up the pebble beach, my mind was clear.
I set out my reasons at length in tomorrow's Sunday Telegraph but, essentially, two events settled the matter for me. The first was the interview given in July by the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, in which he declared that, happy as he was to have had them, he wanted US troops out of his country as soon as possible. In that instant, John McCain's best argument - that the US had a duty to stay in Iraq because a friendly government was asking for help - was vaporised.
The second event was the financial crisis - or rather, the mistaken response to it. The bail-out may or may not succeed in its stated purpose. But it will increase the size of the federal government by a third. The US simply cannot afford the kind of foreign policy that McCain is proposing any longer - at least, not without an unacceptable diminution of freedom at home and influence abroad.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for an armed and active America. I'm an Atlanticist and an Anglosphere man, and I regard the alliance of the free English-speaking nations as the happiest geo-political fact of our era. But the US is now in danger of repeating the mistake that Britain made a hundred years ago: wasting her strength through imperial overstretch.
This observation would once have been a commonplace among Republicans. From the earliest days of their party through to Robert Taft in the 1950s, Republicans tended to view foreign policy adventurism as the enemy of personal freedom, dispersed power, small government and, indeed, the constitution itself. They understood that the founding fathers had counselled against imperialism precisely because they had feared the concentration of power. They grasped that there was an incompatibility, in Russell Kirk's phrase, between an American Republic and an American Empire.
I am no more a pacifist than they were. America was right to fight the Nazis and the Soviets, and the world will long be in her debt. She was right, too, to go after Mullah Omar, and she may one day have to go after the ayatollahs in Teheran. But she has no business running semi-official protectorates on far continents. Colonies, as the founding fathers understood and sought to impress on their successors, are expensive, ungrateful and deleterious to good government.
Today, that older Republican tradition has few advocates other than the brilliant Ron Paul. The party's dominant strain is the one embodied by McCain's hero, Theodore Roosevelt. It was the Teddy Roosevelt who began engorging the federal government, seizing powers under the contingency of war that were never returned. Indeed, it was the imperialism of the earlier Roosevelt that made possible the baleful statism of the later.
Republicans need to get back to basis. They win when they are localist: when they stand for low taxes, states' rights, limited government and individual liberty. They lose when they go in for big federal budgets, protectionism, crony capitalism and, for that matter, the socialisation of failing banks.
Let me put it another way. I'm a conservative because I don't like meddlesome politicians and functionaries. I regret the way power has been concentrated in the Executive since Roosevelt's day. I think the founding fathers knew what they were doing when they listed Congress before the Presidency in the Constitution. The GOP used to conservative in this sense, too. The party's golden age was the period between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, when it held Congress for 26 out of 30 years. The Republicans' guiding principle during that era was "strong Congress, weak White House".
Now, from that perspective, which is preferable: a second Teddy Roosevelt, whose main policy objective is to keep the US garrison in Iraq? Or a president who will be decorative rather than functional, a feel-good politician whose main ambition is to transcend party divisions?
"Barack Obama is all things to all men", say my critics on this blog. Well, yes. But isn't that what presidents ought to be? It's curious to see how those words, "all things to all men", have become derogatory. The phrase comes from 1 Corinthians: St Paul uses it to explain how he brings the gospel to different constituencies:
"And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law; to them that are without law, as without law, that I might gain them that are without law."
Obama's appeal is similar. He's a Protestant who was brought up among Muslims. He's from Kansas and at the same time from Hawaii. Unto the blacks, he became as a black, that he might gain the blacks; to them that are white, as a white that he might gain the whites.
Let me remind you of a passage from the 2004 which brought him to national attention:
"The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states: red for Republicans, blue for Democrats. But I've got news for them. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states."
That's the stuff, Obama: warm, inspiring, jolly. Exactly what I want from a president. Stick to making speeches like that, respect the prerogatives of Congress and the jurisdictions of the 50 states, don't interfere, and you'll be a stunning success. In the mean time, the country can tackle its burgeoning federal budget, and the GOP can rediscover the things that used to make it electable.
Three closing thoughts, which may offer some consolation to conservative readers who are fuming at my apostasy. First, you'll be relieved to know that I don't have a vote. Second, if I did, I would unhesitatingly cast it for Republican congressional candidates. Third, it's going to be a heck of a lot closer than the opinion polls suggest.
I was a conservative for Obama; now I can't decide
For a long time, I was a lonely Obamacon. Now I'm in an agony of indecision, changing my mind back and forth almost hourly.
In an attempt to order my thoughts, I list the pros and cons of the two candidates. McCain's pros are easy. He has the courage and honour of one of those soldier-presidents who served the Republic in its early years. He is a patriot, and no one else's man. He has a healthy scepticism for Left-wing judges and UN bureaucrats. He seems genuinely committed to participatory, Jeffersonian democracy.
His cons? The biggie, which I won't bother rehearsing all over again, is his naïve support for European integration. For a bloke who has made international affairs his thing, this is serious. Nor is it his only foreign policy gaffe. For example - and this hasn't been widely reported here, but it has been all over the Hispanophone press - he recently appeared not to have had the slightest idea who the Spanish Prime Minister was. Fair enough: I forget things, too, and I'm half his age. But I'm not proposing to lead the free world. Age can count. I remember the moment when I knew in my belly that Bill Clinton was going to win in 1996. It was when I saw a Democrat bumper sticker that had cruelly turned the "Dole '96" slogan into "Dole is 96".
So what about the other chap? I have finally managed to get hold of the evidence that Barack Obama has the most Left-wing voting record in the Senate. (Readers have been citing this survey at me with great regularity, but failing to produce it when challenged.) It turns out that the issues on which he was Leftiest were abortion and opposition to the Iraq war. Now, for a lot of conservatives, these are deal-breakers. Fair enough. But I take the eccentric view that abortion law should be determined by state legislatures (just as I deeply resent the EU's growing role in embryology and fertilisation issues, which ought to be determined by national parliaments).
As for Iraq, I'm afraid I break ranks on that one. Not that I'm a peacenik: I was all for biffing the Taleban, and I think we may well need to have a pop at the ayatollahs, too. But I took the view that the invasion of Iraq would damage Western interests, and I feel that the continuing garrison is doing more harm than good.
That said, Obama has some other views that alarm me. His economic and social policies are worryingly European, and some of his pronouncements suggest that he wants a Clinton-style universal healthcare policy. Dude, don't go there: that's what we've got in this country, and we have some of the worst healthcare outcomes in the developed world.
When it comes to economics, I'm not wildly impressed by either man. McCain frankly admits that he knows nothing about the subject, and his response to the collapse of Lehman Brothers was rambling and incoherent. Obama seems better-read and better-briefed; but his spending commitments, when totted up, are rather larger than McCain's. The last thing the US needs in current circs is an expansion of the federal budget.
Obama's pros? Again, these are easy. The election of a mixed-race president who opposed the Iraq war would cause at least some anti-Americans to reconsider their attitudes. Not all of them, to be sure. Simply by being a powerful and free democracy, the US attracts resentment, often from those with the greatest cause to be grateful to her. "Take up the white man's burden," Kipling urged the Americans a hundred years ago, "and reap his old reward: the blame of those ye better, the hate of those ye guard". The burden may become a black man's, but Americans would still be resented by jihadis and South American anti-yanquis and sophist Left-bank intellectuals droning on about coca-colonialism. Still, an Obama presidency would make the US better liked than at present - see this fun interactive chart - and that, surely, is worth something.
At the same time, Obama's victory would put the grievance-mongers out of business: the Sharptons and Farrakhans and Rev Wrights would find their narrative of race relations falsified overnight. No wonder they keep trying to sabotage him.
Above all, Obama seems better set than any other Democrat to unite the country. McCain and Hillary may be friends, but a contest between them would have been a rerun of the last three presidential campaigns: a vicious Kulturkampf in which two tribes questioned not just each other's policies, but each other's motives and decency. Obama, as I've argued before, is the best Democrat that a conservative can hope for: feel-good, decorative, unideological, keen on bipartisanship, determined always to say nice things about Right wingers. Recent elections have been so bitter that Americans sometimes seem to be in danger of losing sight of what unites them. As Jefferson (the only politician whose bust adorns my office) reminded his countrymen: "every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle."
My ideal president would one who was limited in his ambition; one who respected states' rights and of the prerogatives of Congress; one, in short, who believed in the letter and the spirit of the US Constitution - which, it is often forgotten, ranks the legislature first, coming to the presidency only in Article 2.
Who comes closest? Ron Paul, obviously. But of McCain and Obama? I just can't decide. What do you think, my friends? I'm genuinely open to persuasion.
January 13, 2008:
The conservative case for Barack Obama
Lots of you have taken issue with my "support" for Barack Obama. Actually, my article wasn't an endorsement (not that he or anyone else will care what I think). Rather, it was an exploration of the difference between American and British political culture. The former is optimistic, gives politicians the benefit of the doubt, and produced The West Wing; the latter is cynical, treats all elected representatives as shysters, and gave us The Thick of It. It's hard to imagine a campaign like Obama's doing so well in Britain, and perhaps we are the poorer for it.
Much the politest admonition came from Melanie Philips, who had compared Obama's rise with the Diana syndrome, prompting me to post a comment on her blog. Those of you who know Melanie only from her writing might imagine a stern, slightly scary lady. In reality she is charming, clever and funny. And, as always, she stuck by her guns:
"Dear Daniel", she wrote, "I'm surprised by your support for Obama. I do think he's on the wrong side of everything, and you are unfair to say I'm against him just because of Iraq. He is on the further reaches of the left, with all the attitudes that go with that. On culture war issues, he's on the side of social anarchy. On counter-terrorism, he's against all the measures the US needs to take to make itself safer. On Iraq, by saying he'd pull out he has already made the west less safe; if he carried this out the consequences for the region and for the west's defence would be calamitous."
Well, Melanie and I disagree about Iraq. But on the domestic front, does it much matter? Surely there is a respectable conservative argument in favour of Obama, one which sees a virtue in his lack of detailed plans. 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 one skill he has, as even his worst detractors admit, is a Reagan-like ability to project optimism. And optimism, in America, goes a long way.
It's true, of course, that the President has an important international role (although I don't see opposition to the Iraq war as the disqualification that most of my fellow conservatives do). But, when Presidents meddle at home, it often goes wrong. Many of George W Bush's mistakes, for example, have stemmed from unnecessary intervention in domestic politics: the steel tariff, the expansion of the federal budget, the disregard for states' rights he displayed when seeking to ban same-sex marriage at federal level.
I am generally a loyal Republican, though I haven't been bowled over by the talent on offer this time (despite my fondness for Ron Paul, whom I like to think I spotted earlier than some). But give poor Obama a break. He's a shaft of sunshine in an often grey landscape. He's a lot more inspiring than the other two Democrats and than some of the GOP candidates. Alright, if he won, he wouldn't be the greatest president of our time (that honour is reserved for Ronald Reagan). But he'd be a heck of a lot better than many.
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