As a Conservative, I Must Say I Do Quite Like the Cut of this Obama Fellow’s Jib

By T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII
Columnist, The National Topsider
Membership Chairman, The Newport Club

When my late father T. Coddington Van Voorhees VI founded the iconoclastic conservative journal National Topsider in 1948, he famously declared that “Now is the time for all good conservative helmsmen to hoist the mizzen, pour the cocktails, and steer this damned schooner hard starboard.” In the 60 years since he first uttered it after one-too-many Cosmopolitans at one of Pamela Harriman’s notorious foreign policy black tie balls, father’s pithy bon mot has served as a rallying cry for conservatives from Greenwich to Chevy Chase. Today, I say it’s time for we conservatives to once again grab the rigging and set sail with the flotilla of the true conservative in this race: Barack Obama.

For context, this is about the endorsement by Christopher Buckley, the son of National Review founder and conservative founding father William F. Buckley, of avowed socialist Barack Obama.

So why weren’t those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don’t see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn’t; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay-out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power . . . only to discover that you’re presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn’t have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you’ll lose your job before you cross that finish line, ten years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway - all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself: an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career. With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it’s all for the good of the country…

Read the whole thing. It’s like a Dear John letter written by a grieving man to an abusive, drug-addicted spouse.

The reality is: I quickly realized Rudy was a maniac. I had a recurring fantasy in which I took him out during a press conference (it was nonlethal, just something that put him out of commission for a year or so), saving America from the horror of a President Giuliani. If that sounds like I had some trouble being “objective,” I did. Objectivity is a fallacy. In campaign reporting more than any other kind of press coverage, reporters aren’t just covering a story, they’re a part of it—influencing outcomes, setting expectations, framing candidates—and despite what they tell themselves, it’s impossible to both be a part of the action and report on it objectively.

And my theories about McCain still hold.

For a long time, this was John McCain’s ace in the hole with the press, whom he referred to as “my base.” Reporters rode along with him, and he joked with them, and that went a long way toward shaping the tone of their coverage.

Charles at the LGF link adds:

He doesn’t even seem to be self-conscious about revealing what a dishonest, biased scumbag he is.

Charles, he’s not a scumbag. He’s normal. Journalists are not reporters. They aren’t trained to be unbiased. They are trained to obfuscate their activism in the fog of semi-objective language, much as how this Hastings fellow describes:

Still, I ate meals with staffers and campaign managers. I tried to say things that would make me appear sympathetic to Rudy while not technically lying. (“Wow, he sure seems popular.” “I was in New York on 9/11, and I have to be honest with you, I was glad Rudy was in charge.”)

You see, Charles, as he talks about “appearing sympathetic,” he reveals his purpose. He’s there to maintain a good relationship with the subject of his stories. This is to get information. That information is to be used, not reported, his weak description of “objectivity mantras” notwithstanding.

I tried to stay out of any discussion about issues and to just repeat the mantra to myself: I am here to observe and record, observe and record.

No, Mr. Hastings. “Observe and record” died with the Watergate papers. Really, it died when newspapers stopped being businesses, but Watergate sounded the death knell. When reporters became journalists, fact gave way to larger “truths.” It became about you Mr. Hastings.

The best-funded political campaign in American history says news organizations will have to pay—in some cases almost $2,000 each—if they want to cover Barack Obama’s election-night celebration in Chicago. A memo sent to news organizations on Tuesday by the Obama campaign says credentials will cost $715 to $1,815, depending on whether electrical and phone lines are needed and whether an indoor or outdoor seat is requested for the event, which is expected to be held outside the evening of Nov. 4 in Grant Park.

Ed Morrissy adds:

Well, that’s only fair. If Obama winds up getting elected because of the cheerleading of the national media –who vetted a plumber more harshly than a major-party candidate for President — they should start paying before the rest of us pony up.

Heh, indeed.

The original concept was funny because Terry Tate’s targets were generic cube rats, not specific people. When I first watched the video above, I didn’t laugh. It just wasn’t funny. In fact, it was creepy. Can you imagine him doing the same to Barack Obama? Uh, somehow I doubt that’s going to happen.

And yet, we’re told that the Republicans are seething in a “climate of hate.” Why? Because someone at a rally called Obama a “terrorist.” Never mind the last eight years of Chimpy McBushitler and “Bush is a terrorist” rhetoric. Never mind the mindless rage demonstrated by the modern left. Never mind the bricks being thrown at the Alabama delegation at the RNC convention by leftist protesters. Or the bleach being sprayed at Republican convention-goers by anti-war protestors.

Now we have the McCain-Palin campaign bus allegedly being shot.

We learned at this morning’s Stop Obama Rally here that the McCain/Palin Straight Talk Express came through town yesterday. It arrived with a window shattered by a .22 caliber weapon. It had also been hit by an unknown number of paint balls from a paint ball gun or guns. There were reportedly no injuries and neither candidate was on board.

No coverage. Nothing. The world is changing, folks.

It’s strange, and completely different from anything I’ve felt about a candidate before now, but that’s how I feel.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t respect her as a leader. I certainly do, which is probably why this feels as strange as it does. Women have been leading in an executive capacity for centuries, albeit intermittently, but never before has a woman executive been so much of a woman. Essentially, women executives to this point have been, for lack of a better phrase, men with uteri. That’s not to say that they did not express femininity; certainly Elizabeth I, among others, was astute enough to know that her “feminine weakness” could be used as a strength.

What is curious about Palin is that she not only is able to exert palpable strength, but she’s able to do it in a way that appeals to my respect for motherhood. Take this story from the NYT (via HotAir):

“They bear us children, they risk their lives to give us birth, so maybe it’s time we let a woman lead us,” said Larry Hawkins, a former truck driver attending a rally late Thursday at Elon University in North Carolina. Mr. Hawkins said he would rather vote for Ms. Palin than for “McCain and Obama combined.”

This is not a bespectacled urbanite who’s been so long emasculated by bra-burning, man-hating feminism that he can’t remember when he last had a pair. This is a truck driver who probably tells blonde jokes in his spare time (*wink*, ZooMommy). And yet, he’s sees in Palin something that makes him want to follow this woman, this mother of five. There are other quality pull quotes from that story that demonstrate the same idea. That is not normal.

The very first thing I said to my family when I watched Palin’s acceptance speech was:

Palin is exactly the kind of woman I want as President. Why? The first thing she did in her acceptance speech is talk about and laud her husband. That means she has a keen sense of situational and social awareness. She knows that there is a natural tendency to reject female leadership, but the fact that she’s quick to accommodate that reality by showing strength through deference means she knows how to navigate the complexity of conflict without getting wrecked on the rocks of pride or losing her identity. That’s the kind of woman that can walk into a room with Vladimir Putin and let him glower and gloat over her supposed weakness while she quietly stares him down and outmaneuvers him behind the scenes.

Why did I immediately think that? Why did the truck driver want to follow the mother of five?

I’m not sure, but I strongly believe it’s because she is a mother of five, a wife proud of her husband, a citizen of Wassila, a PTA mom… everything that makes a woman a woman… and she’s not apologetic for it. It is who she is, and she wears it like a favorite coat.

She is the prototype for what strong women throughout history have been, but because technology allows mothers of five to be mothers of five and still run for the Presidency Vice Presidency, she can be exactly who she is and lead from that standpoint.

These are just thoughts, cast out into the ether, but they’re my thoughts.

“We are very excited, we feel that we are at a turning point,” Della Piana, an imposing half-Italian, half-African American with a pony tail, told AFP.

“We can afford to be less on the defensive for the first time since Ronald Reagan, and we can say our word in rebuilding America on a new basis, rebuilding a better world, instead of one based on the greed of the few.”

He has a pony tail. Not so much relevant as intriguing, but hey, this is about making a story sell, folks.