Justin Raimondo

March 21, 2008

A point I made in my recent interview with Antiwar.com Radio: if you go over to National Review, the spectacle of the neocons yelping and spitting out their hatred of Obama should clarify, once and for all, what this presidential election is going to be all about. As Andrew Bacevich put it in a recent issue of The American Conservative, ?Give the neocons this much: they appreciate the stakes.? Now, it seems, a sliver of light has broken through the nearly unrelieved darkness over at “The Corner,” in the form of Charles Murray’s commentary on Obama’s recent speech on race:

“It?s about time that people who disagree with Obama?s politics recognize that he is genuinely different. When he talks, he sounds like a real human being, not a politician. I?m not referring to the speechifying, but to the way he comes across all the time. We?ve had lots of charming politicians. I cannot think of another politician in my lifetime who conveys so much sense of talking to individuals, and talking to them in ways that he sees as one side of a dialogue. Conservatives who insist that he?s nothing but an even slicker Bill Clinton are missing a reality about him, and at their peril.

“I can?t vote for him. He is an honest-to-God lefty. He apparently has learned nothing from the 1960s. His Supreme Court nominees would be disasters. And maybe he is too green and has lived too much of his adult life in a politically correct bubble. But the other day he talked about race in ways that no other major politician has tried to do, with a level of honesty that no other major politician has dared, and with more insight than any other major politician possesses. Not bad.”
Amen.