NATO AIR
02-01-2008, 02:49 PM
Wow! This is the kind of thing I've been seeing on the ground but this adds serious intellectual heft to support the idea that a fair number of conservatives would rather have Obama than anyone else in the field.
http://www.vnews.com/02012008/4601389.htm
Archconservative Sides With Democrat
By Peter Jamison
Valley News Staff Writer
Lyme -- Jeffrey Hart sat at his kitchen table in slippers, reading Barack Obama's words aloud. The retired Dartmouth professor, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, wore on his shirt an artifact of the 1900 Republican presidential ticket -- a McKinley-Roosevelt pin.
“I am not opposed to all wars,” Hart intoned, quoting a 2002 speech before the Illinois State Legislature in which Obama, then a state senator, had warned of the perils of invading Iraq. “I'm opposed to dumb wars.” Looking up from the page, Hart nodded his approval.
“Very Burkian,” he said, referring to the 18th century Irish political writer Edmund Burke, hailed by many as the founder of modern conservatism. “Prudential. A sense of history, and what we're up against there.”
Hart wore another campaign pin on his shirt: It displayed a now-familiar rising sun, and the words Obama '08.
The 2008 presidential campaign has not been short on surprises, some of which have confounded the physics of the political universe: former Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman endorsing GOP front-runner John McCain, or Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Capitol Hill veteran, spurning the Clinton machine to support Obama's upstart candidacy.
But even in this unsettled campaign season, the conversion of Hart -- speechwriter for two Republican presidents, former writer for the National Review, and patron saint of the notorious Dartmouth Review -- to Obama's banner is cause for a double take. Nancy Hart said she believes her husband is emblematic of a larger class of old-school Republicans disenchanted with the status quo.
“People who are disgusted with Bush,” she said. “A lot of them are.”
And so it is that Jeffrey Hart counts himself a member of Obama's “new American majority” -- a group of voters the Illinois senator says are fed up with the partisan excesses and wrangling of the last two decades and eager for a practical, cooperative approach to the issues that have divided Washington.
“It turns out that these political parties are not always either liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican,” Hart, a 77-year-old with thick white hair who lives in Lyme, said in an interview at his home yesterday. “The Democrat, under certain conditions, can be the conservative.”
More at link
http://www.vnews.com/02012008/4601389.htm
Archconservative Sides With Democrat
By Peter Jamison
Valley News Staff Writer
Lyme -- Jeffrey Hart sat at his kitchen table in slippers, reading Barack Obama's words aloud. The retired Dartmouth professor, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, wore on his shirt an artifact of the 1900 Republican presidential ticket -- a McKinley-Roosevelt pin.
“I am not opposed to all wars,” Hart intoned, quoting a 2002 speech before the Illinois State Legislature in which Obama, then a state senator, had warned of the perils of invading Iraq. “I'm opposed to dumb wars.” Looking up from the page, Hart nodded his approval.
“Very Burkian,” he said, referring to the 18th century Irish political writer Edmund Burke, hailed by many as the founder of modern conservatism. “Prudential. A sense of history, and what we're up against there.”
Hart wore another campaign pin on his shirt: It displayed a now-familiar rising sun, and the words Obama '08.
The 2008 presidential campaign has not been short on surprises, some of which have confounded the physics of the political universe: former Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman endorsing GOP front-runner John McCain, or Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Capitol Hill veteran, spurning the Clinton machine to support Obama's upstart candidacy.
But even in this unsettled campaign season, the conversion of Hart -- speechwriter for two Republican presidents, former writer for the National Review, and patron saint of the notorious Dartmouth Review -- to Obama's banner is cause for a double take. Nancy Hart said she believes her husband is emblematic of a larger class of old-school Republicans disenchanted with the status quo.
“People who are disgusted with Bush,” she said. “A lot of them are.”
And so it is that Jeffrey Hart counts himself a member of Obama's “new American majority” -- a group of voters the Illinois senator says are fed up with the partisan excesses and wrangling of the last two decades and eager for a practical, cooperative approach to the issues that have divided Washington.
“It turns out that these political parties are not always either liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican,” Hart, a 77-year-old with thick white hair who lives in Lyme, said in an interview at his home yesterday. “The Democrat, under certain conditions, can be the conservative.”
More at link