An Endorsement That Matters

If you haven't already seen it, go read Christopher Hitchens's Vote for Obama.

It has been hard for me to read someone whose views I admire on other topics go endlessly off on the supposed threat to civilization of radical Islam. This obsession of his has of course meant that Hitchens has been anything but in the tank for Obama lo these many months. Hitchens has been, for example, even more hawkish than McCain on Iraq. But he has made a decision about the way he will vote, and this excerpt sums up nicely where he has finally arrived -- he has conceded that trying to vote only on the issues isn't right, that personality also matters a lot:

But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week's so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him. [cf. --bjk]

I suppose it could be said, as Michael Gerson has alleged, that the Obama campaign's choice of the word erratic to describe McCain is also an insinuation. But really, it's only a euphemism. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear had to feel sorry for the old lion on his last outing and wish that he could be taken somewhere soothing and restful before the night was out. The train-wreck sentences, the whistlings in the pipes, the alarming and bewildered handhold phrases—"My friends"—to get him through the next 10 seconds. I haven't felt such pity for anyone since the late Adm. James Stockdale humiliated himself as Ross Perot's running mate. And I am sorry to have to say it, but Stockdale had also distinguished himself in America's most disastrous and shameful war, and it didn't qualify him then and it doesn't qualify McCain now.

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: "What does he take me for?" Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama's position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

It therefore seems to me that the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and that both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators, congressmen, and governors who endorse them.

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[Added] Andrew Sullivan passes along two more endorsements, from the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, that echo the same sentiment. The LAT says McCain has been "disturbingly unfocused in his response to the current financial situation," and the CT says "McCain failed in his most important executive decision." Read the rest.

[Added]Steve Benen also notes the endorsements, and observes that the LAT hasn't endorsed anyone for president for decades, and the CT has not once, in 160 years, endorsed a Democrat for president. He also reports endorsements from the The Washington Post, which has been center-right lately, and two papers that backed Bush in 2004, The Denver Post and (*gasp*) The Salt Lake Tribune.