Buckley buckles

I was at lunch today and a colleague told me over the cutlery clashing din on Stone Street that Christopher Buckley, son of the super-arch conservative William F. Buckley endorsed Obama. I really did not believe him, but I got back into work and indeed, there it was...

"This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?"

Black / White or Shades of Grey

Yesterday Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama answered identical questions at the Saddleback Church under an interview format conducted by the church's pastor Rick Warren.

McCain's answers seemed scripted, pandering, straight off the cuff and tended to see issues in black and white. Life begins at conception; marriage is between a man and woman with little leeway for civil unions, the definition of a rich person as one who make more than 5 million a year and making weepy anecdotes combining Christianity and military service at the drop of a hat. Of course, he also drummed in his newfound mantra of drill, drill, drill for oil...

Obama on the other hand seemed analytical, taking time to think through the answers and seemed to not see radical issues in such black and white terms. Abortion was a right that women must enjoy as long as it is not late term and must be legalized, marriage was between a man and a woman but right under civil unions will be respected as much under his presidency, a rich person was one who makes more than 250,000 dollars a year and very little anecdotes pandering to the mostly evangelical white crowd. It is also interesting that he first two people Obama spoke of as important advisers were women.

Even if core issues such as the ones asked yesterday will never have pat answers, it is clear that people are blindly looking for the black and white. Very few seem ready for a deeper analysis that goes to the heart of such issues. People seem to be naturally gravitating towards the pandering, anecdotal, binary beanbag.