There will be plenty of eulogies from people who knew William F. Buckley better than I did–and certainly from those who agreed with him more than I did. But he was an honest man, an actual conservative–who, in the end, was quietly appalled by George W. Bush’s radicalism, in Iraq and when it came to the federal budget. He was a lovely writer, of course. His book, The Unmaking of a Mayor, an account of his own wry run for mayor of New York in 1965, is not only hilarious but also an early–and accurate–critique of the political correctness, unionized sclerosis and wasteful bureaucracy that almost killed the world’s greatest city in the 1960s and 1970s. He was an excellent man. My condolences to all the Buckleys.
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The Phony War: Obama and Romney Are Debating Character, Not Policy
More than five months from Election Day, the back-and-forth about Mitt Romney’s record at Bain already feels played out. Unfortunately, there’s good reason to expect the campaign continues in this vein indefinitely. Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney are terribly interested in dwelling on policy platforms. Romney’s plan to slash spending and keep taxes low on the wealthy isn’t especially popular, at least not at any level of detail beyond a blithe promise to shrink the deficit. Meanwhile, Obama’s signature first-term achievements, like health care, the stimulus and Wall Street reform, are all unpopular or tricky to sell. (The Dodd-Frank bill is the most popular of these, but hyping it means offending wealthy donors.) So what we’re getting instead is a superficial duel about character–and, worse, one that’s based on the largely false premise that the better man can better “manage” the economy back to health.
