by The Puppet Mistress | Boris Johnson, the conservative Mayor of London, has come out in support of Barack Obama in a Tory newspaper and his ingenuous arguments in support are a treat. Has anyone told Limbaugh?
He starts off with a Wildean crack at W, though the follow-through is a bit weak:
Democracy and capitalism are the two great pillars of the American idea.
To have rocked one of those pillars may be regarded as a misfortune.
To have damaged the reputation of both, at home and abroad, is a pretty stunning achievement for an American president. (Telegraph)
I wish he had stayed closer to the original script and said something more along these lines: "To have damaged the reputation of both, at home and abroad, is a pretty stunning achievement for an American president looks like willfulness." It would have been funnier. (Telegraph)
Johnson called McCain a "brave and principled man," so I guess he hasn't been following McCain's campaign tactics too closely.
Of Obama, Johnson says:
There are all sorts of reasons for hoping that Barack Hussein Obama will be the next president of the United States. He seems highly intelligent. He has an air of courtesy and sincerity. Unlike the current occupant of the White House, he has no difficulty in orally extemporising a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb.
Unlike his opponent, he visibly incarnates change and hope, at a time when America desperately needs both.(Telegraph)
That was, of course, last summer's meme----Johnson is behind the times. Nowadays what Americans are responding too are Obama's visibly incarnating a cool head, an air of imperturbability, a pragmatic approach to our pressing problems (alliteration!), and reasoned judgment. We're done with hope, though not---we hope---with change.
He has shown terrific steel, beating off the Clintons, and defeating McCain in all three televised debates.
If elections were decided on the ruthless efficiency of campaigns, then Obama would already have it in the bag.
The defining image of the battle so far is of the two candidates leaving the stage after the last TV debate - Obama moving confidently off, after another grave and measured performance, and McCain gagging like a gargoyle, tongue out, as he realised he was about to walk over the edge.
I am not suggesting that McCain is a buffoon, or that Obama is quite as Messianic as some of his supporters seem to believe.
He gave a speech of unrivalled torpor in Germany, for instance. He needs to stick up more vigorously for free trade, and we must hope that any ill-considered new taxes will be thwarted by Congress.
But then again, he is patently not the Marxist subversive loony Lefty that some of his detractors allege....
Obama's terrorist chum is now a professor, and his last act of terrorism took place when the candidate was eight, and it is not really clear that he and Obama are chums at all.
The entire set of allegations seem to be an attempt to smear him by association, and are about as damaging as pointing out that some of Tony Blair's colleagues used to be Stalinists, or that Tory party conferences used to feature people who advocated the hanging of Nelson Mandela.
Obama deserves to win because he seems talented, compassionate, and because he offers the hope of rejuvenating the greatest country on earth in the eyes of the rest of us. All those are sufficient reasons for desiring his victory.(Telegraph)
Ol' Boris makes an additional argument you wouldn't find many Americans daring to make: that Obama should win because he is black.
After centuries of friction, prejudice, tension, hatred - you name it, they've had it - America is teetering on the brink of a triumph. If Obama wins, then the United States will have at last come a huge and maybe decisive step closer to achieving the dream of Martin Luther King, of a land where people are judged not on the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.
If Obama wins, then black people the world over will be able to see how a gifted man has been able to smash through the ultimate glass ceiling.
If Obama wins, then it will be simply fatuous to claim that there are no black role models in politics or government, because there is no higher role model than the President of the United States.(Telegraph)
And, because he is a Tory, Johnson makes a Tory argument:
If Barack Hussein Obama is successful next month, then we could even see the beginning of the end of race-based politics, with all the grievance-culture and special interest groups and political correctness that come with it.
If Obama wins, he will have established that being black is as relevant to your ability to do a hard job as being left-handed or ginger-haired, and he will have re-established America's claim to be the last, best hope of Earth.(Telegraph)
Yeah, right. When Obama is elected, poverty and racial prejudice will magically disappear. He really hasn't been paying attention, has he?
Anyway---BONUS!--- he's annoyed Mark Steyn at The Corner.
Boris Johnson, my former boss at The Spectator and now somewhat improbably the Mayor of London*, is the latest to join the Obamaniacs. Needless to say, I disagree with my old friend and have always regarded him as a total squish when it comes to ideological soundness, but this is a less incoherent analysis of the problems with the Republican brand than those advanced by Colin Powell, Ken Adelman and Christopher Buckley.
Steyn further snarks:
If Boris can be Mayor of London, Sarah Palin is certainly qualified to be President of the United States, if not Supreme Galactic Commander of the Cosmos.
And if Mark Steyn is qualified to push his political rantings as political commentary, I am qualified to be King, Queen, and Jack of the Political Blogosphere. Anyone can play that game. Besides, I don't believe Steyn has any friends, except perhaps the other blathering primates who populate The Corner.
Irritating Tory columnist Toby Harnden has also written a counter-blaste that is either politely begging to differ or dripping with sarcasm; I just can't tell. At any rate, he seems to think it inconsistent for Johnson---"notwithstanding the brilliant writer and impressive politician that he is"---to have endorsed Obama after having previously endorsed "one Hillary Clinton." (Telegraph) Nonsense, sir; all good Clinton supporters switched to Obama when he won the nomination.
He's a bit bothered by Johnson's arguments in favor of Obama.
With a seemingly straight face, Boris argues that race is a "reason" for wanting Obama to be elected, blithely stating that many white racists will vote against him because he's black while many blacks will back him because of he's one of their own. And yet - get this - an Obama victory will show that in modern America "people are judged not on the colour of their skin but by the content of their character". Talk about trying to have it both ways....
In this case, the reasoning actually cheapens Obama's candidacy by treating him as a mere racial symbol, worthy of Boris's nod because he's black, presentable, "not the Marxist subversive loony Lefty that some of his detractors allege" and "seems to stand for hope, not fear".
Electing a US president is more than just a jolly jape or a vehicle for a whimsical column. There are many good cases to be made for electing Obama. Alas, my esteemed colleague's column is not one of them. (Telegraph)
Like most Tories Harnden and Johnson don't quite grasp realize that the average British conservative politician would, by American standards, be a neoliberal of the annoying so-called "sensible" sort or---at most---conservative expat Andrew Sullivan. (Sullivan predictably calls Johnson's comments "a sane conservative take." (Daily Dish))
Harnden also asked:
Why on earth does a conservative British politician like Boris, a potential future Prime Minister, feel the need to endorse a liberal candidate in a US presidential election? (Telegraph)
He further snipes:
Like all the other Europeans pontificating about how great Obama is, Boris has no vote, though he was born in the US and, according to his biographer and fellow Telegraph hack Andrew Gimson, showed early signs of megalomania as a child by expressing an ambition to win the White House.(Telegraph)
Heh. Since I don't follow UK politics, he'll always be emblazoned in my memory as he appeared here, blathering on about "bendy buses" as Jeremy Paxman---who really ought to moderate all debates everywhere---harangued him.
Memeorandum has other reactions.
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