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October 14th, 2008 at 10:17 pm

Video: Christopher Buckley Endorses Barack Obama, Resigns from National Review

Christopher Buckley

Christopher Buckley, political satirist and novelist, has resigned from the National Review, the political journal his father, conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. founded in 1955. Buckley resigned in the aftermath of controversy over his endorsement of Democratic Presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama. See video of a post-resignation interview Buckley gave to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.

It was the stunning aftermath of his endorsement of Obama which he wrote, not in the National Review, but in another publication, Tina Brown’sTheDailyBeast.com. His blog post, Sorry Dad, I’m Voting for Obama eloquently lays out a case for a small-government conservative–tired of eight years of unprecedented governmental expansion, two wars, and a burgeoning federal deficit–to support Barack Obama’s candidacy. Nonetheless, it set off a firestorm.

Mr. Buckley said he had “been effectively fatwahed by the conservative movement” after endorsing Barack Obama in a blog posting on TheDailyBeast.com; since then, he said he has been blanketed with hate mail at the blog and at the National Review, where he has written a column.

As a result, he wrote to Richard Lowry, the editor of the National Review, and its publisher, Jack Fowler, offering to resign, and “this offer was rather briskly accepted,” Mr. Buckley said.

Source: Buckley’s Son Leaves National Review

Photo: Christopher Buckley at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington (Photo credit: H. Darr Beiser/USA Today)

Buckley discussed the resignation with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Hardball on October 14, 2008.

Here is an excerpt of Buckley’s “controversial” endorsement.

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

His follow-up post, originally titled “Sorry Dad, I was Fired” was retitled: Buckley Bows Out of National Review

National Review publisher Rich Lowry took issue with some of Christopher Buckley’s claims and wrote a response: A Word on Christopher Buckley

Christopher Buckley, the former managing editor of Esquire magazine and founding editor of Forbes FYI, is also, under ordinary circumstances, when not being fatwahed, the best-selling author of several novels, most recently, Supreme Courtship, in which a fictional U.S. President nominates a popular TV judge, reminiscent of Judge Judy, to the Supreme Court.

It goes to show that this election 2008 is not far from satire with the minimally qualified Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s nomination as Republican VP candidate. Buckley talked about the novel and his reactions to the Joe Biden Sarah Palin VP debate in an interview on Night Talk on Bloomberg on October 4, 2008.