Food Watch: Should a person give up peanut butter on account of Bill Buckley (or Charlton Heston)?

This custom label was made for William F. Buckley's lifetime supply of Red Wing, the peanut butter he declared "paradise on earth in a jar."

by Ken

Just recently I read that some big-deal food person doesn't like peanut butter, and I just grin and bore it. I love peanut butter. In fact, as I expect I've mentioned, somewhere along life's journey I switched from childhood "smooth" allegiance to a full-fledged "crunchy" addiction. (As it happens, my older brother was the "crunchy" fan in our house.) With "crunchy," I came to appreciate, you get the feel and taste and eating actual peanuts.

It was easier to deal with high-level anti-peanut-butter advocacy, however, than to deal with certain forms of peanut-butter fandom. Now, nearly 35 years after he went public, I learn that William F. Buckley Jr. was an honest-to-gosh junkie. The NYT's David Segal reports:

Throughout a life of erudite jousting and patrician bonhomie, William F. Buckley Jr. was known as a conservative, a writer, a publisher, a talk-show host, a novelist and an avid sailor. But friends and family would say this biographical summary is incomplete without three more words: peanut butter freak.

Mr. Buckley didn’t just devour the stuff; he rhapsodized about it, telling readers in a 1981 column in National Review, the magazine he founded, that when he first married, he told his wife that he “expected peanut butter for breakfast every day of my life, including Ash Wednesday.”

This lifelong passion was nurtured during Mr. Buckley’s years in an English boarding school, when his father sent twice-a-month care packages that included grapefruits and a large jar of peanut butter. To his astonishment, British pals who shared in his bounty loved the grapefruit and spat out the peanut butter.

“No wonder,” he wrote in that same column, “they needed American help to win the war.”

It was bad enough that I had to live with that obnoxious demon's classical-music advocacy. (You know, "with friends like this . . .") Now, peanut butter too? There's some consolation in knowing that WFB's passion was for the creamy, not the chunky product. In any event, just as I didn't let Bill B's love for classical music spoil mine, I don't plan to be buffaloed by this news.

SPEAKING OF BUFFALO --

The occasion for reporter Segal's resuscitation of this blot on the good name of peanut butter is his visit to the now-shutting-down factory in Fredonia, NY, 45 miles southwest of Buffalo, of the plant where Red Wing peanut butter was formerly made, following the 2013 acquisition of the plant (where mayonnaise, barbecue sauce and jellies were also made) by food conglomerate ConAgra. The visit was made in the company of the longtime president of the company that made Red Wing, Douglas Manly, now 87. (The plant has been shutting down in stages, and is scheduled to be fully shuttered by next month.)

And Red Wing, you see, was Bill Buckley's later-life peanut butter of choice. Manly explained that it was on "a whim" ("I didn’t really think that anything would come of it") that, after Buckley's March 1981 Buckley column, in which "he wrote something about liking Skippy," Manly "asked a sales associate to send him a jar with a note that said, 'We think you'll like this better.' "

Mr. Manly was right. Mr. Buckley’s son, the novelist Christopher Buckley, said in a phone interview: “My dad’s one true quest in life was for the Platonic ideal of peanut butter. And I remember one day he announced, with a look of utter transfiguration on his face, that he had found paradise on earth in a jar with a yellow cap. And it was called Red Wing.”

Among the idle but still present equipment Manly was able to show Segal was "a peanut roaster once hailed as the world’s largest, built to process 10 tons an hour."

Mr. Buckley was on hand for the 1981 ribbon-cutting for this industrial behemoth because soon after he discovered the joys of Red Wing, Mr. Manly invited him to give a speech at the ceremony.

“Without hesitation, my dad said, ‘I’ll be there,' ” Christopher Buckley recalled with a chuckle. “I never saw him accept an invitation faster. And he’d been invited to palaces in his day and said, ‘I’ll have to think about it.’ ”

There are news articles of Mr. Buckley’s visit, which lacked only a brass band and bunting. When Mr. Buckley and his wife, Pat, reached the roaster, a few hundred employees were waiting to hear him speak. In a photo of the event, Mr. Buckley grins in a white lab coat over his jacket and tie.

“Thank you for letting me attend this historic occasion,” Mr. Buckley told the crowd, neatly finding the seam between the grandiose and the comic. He said that he wished Red Wing could be served at United States-Soviet disarmament talks, because once the Russians sampled it, “they would give up all their assets, communism and Karl Marx.”

He took questions from reporters and confirmed that his friend Charlton Heston shared his devotion to peanut butter. Though the actor, Mr. Buckley added, is of the “chunky reform faith.”

As a thank-you for his service that day, Mr. Buckley was given a lifetime’s supply of Red Wing — a dozen 18-ounce jars of the smooth variety, mailed every six months. Each had a custom “Buckley’s Best” label, with a copy of Mr. Buckley’s autograph and his endorsement, “It is quite simply incomparable.”

For years afterward, visitors to Mr. Buckley’s home in Connecticut who expressed any peanut butter enthusiasm were dared to resist Red Wing’s charms. He praised the brand so extravagantly during a radio interview on Manhattan’s WMCA that the show’s host, Barry Gray, said listeners cleaned out local stores.

“The supermarkets in my neighborhood had a run on the peanut butter,” Mr. Gray told Mr. Buckley when he next appeared on the show. “I don’t kid you. There were simply no Red Wing jars to be found for weeks.”

Other peanut-butter fanciers subsequently seconded Buckley's endorsement of Red Wing -- including, Segal reports, New Yorker writer James Stevenson, who in a January 1985 piece announced that, despite his skepticism, given his dim view of Buckley's view on most everything else, the stuff was "superb."

Ironically, Segal learned, Red Wing came into the world as a deliberate knockoff of Jif, which Manly wanted to be able to sell to stores as indistinguishable in quality but cheaper. Why then, Segal asks, "were Mr. Buckley and others so smitten?"

Mr. Manly has a guess. One way to keep down costs was to refuse to store much product. During Mr. Manly’s tenure, orders were accepted 10 days in advance, and no more, sharply limiting the amount of time jars waited on shelves to be shipped.

Red Wing may have bowled over Mr. Buckley because it was far fresher than anything he’d ever eaten. Or not. Brand devotion is often a mystery that flavor can only partly explain. Perhaps discovering an unbidden jar with an uncelebrated name helped hook Mr. Buckley back in 1981. Perhaps he’d never tried Jif.

Actually, we learn, peanut butter like the stuff once manufactured in Fredonia, which has been sold under a bunch of store-brand labels like Wegmans, Price Chopper, Tops, and Our Family, will continue to be made elsewhere in the ConAgra plants, like other products formerly made in the closed-down Ralcorp plant. The peanut butter, supposedly made from the same recipe, will come from a plant in Streator, IL. Segal reports that "Manly sounded skeptical," saying, "We can't be sure, because they won't be using the same equipment or the same personnel."

Segal notes that even if Buckley hadn't died in 2008, he wouldn't be suffering peanut-butter deprivation now.

[A]t the time of his death, he had a stockpile of Red Wing that his son described as large enough “to see the most determined survivalist through the next Armageddon.”

But the younger Buckley didn’t keep it all.

“The night before his funeral,” he said of his father, “into his coffin I slipped my mother’s ashes, his rosary, the TV remote control — and a jar of Red Wing peanut butter. I’d say no pharaoh went off to the next world better equipped.”

Well, if Bill Buckley couldn't put me off Bach, he's not going to put me off peanut butter. Or Charlton Heston either.

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Why is it so hard for "Poor Old Pat" Buchanan to believe that pro-choice people might really hope to see fewer abortions?

It wasn't till this morning that I noticed the comments added to my post yesterday about Christopher Buckley's departure -- a slight step ahead of the wingnut lynch mob -- from National Review, the magazine created by his father, the late William F. Buckley Jr.

It was impossible for me to resist leading with the "sighful" quote Christopher recalled from "dear Pup" ("after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous"): 'You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.'” To which our old friend "Me" responded: "That was wasted effort. It can't be done."

Then commenter Matthew ventured: "His father was actually a horrible human being who is rotting in hell. If he likes his dad, he's probably a bad dude." And in fact Bill Buckley seemed to me quite a horrible human being. (One of my particular problems with Bill Buckley was his steadfast championing of classical music. Jeepers, that's not the kind of ally I'm looking for.) While it seems to me a bit strong to declare someone a bad dude for liking his dad, if we changed that to "If he's like his dad," I could hardly complain. And Christopher Buckley indeed seems quite a lot like old Bill -- even apart from the increasingly creepy physical resemblance.

I was happy to have these correctives, in case I may have been seen to be sentimentalizing Bill Buckley. My point, rather, is that his brand of conservatism, which was at least firmly attached to the real world, serves as a benchmark for how far into the loonosphere the present-day variant has traveled.

Which brings me to Pat Buchanan. I don't mean to link Poor Old Pat to the present-day conservative lunacy, but then, he never quite fit into the old Buckley-style lunacy. Our Pat has always been his own loon. Unless you want to count his even loonier sister, Bay. Myself, I try not to even think about Bay Buchanan.

Poor Old Pat has become especially important to one of his part-time employers, MSNBC, as MSNBC has cast its prime-time lot with two unabashedly liberal hosts, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. Pat, of course, provides "balance."

One of the, er, surprising features of Rachel's show, which continues to shine, has been the semiregular feature "It's Pat," in which Rachel's "fake uncle" moans and whines about some issue of importance to the Right. (More often than not this has so far involved defending the Republican vice presidential candidate, Gov. Danger Moose.) Rachel to her credit fights back. Indeed, as AP television writer David Bauder notes in a really good piece that's ostensibly about the "odd couple" of Rachel and Pat, but in fact is more about Rachel and the show itself, with lots of excellent background material, including Rachel talking about how the show has developed and will continue to develop:

Maddow is something of a happy warrior compared to Olbermann's increasingly dark prince. The Rhodes Scholar can lap almost anyone intellectually without making you hate her for doing it.

"She's likeable," Griffin said. "She smiles, she has fun. She's interesting."

If Olbermann's show has a drumbeat that drives it, Maddow's "got a little bit of a symphony," he said.

She also doesn't back down from a fight. Olbermann's "Countdown" is well-written and meticulous, but he relies on guests who rarely disagree with him.

Maddow frequently brings on guests to argue with her, none more so than Buchanan.

He can exasperate her, and vice versa. To date, it hasn't become nasty.

Of course we understand why Rachel is saddled with Pat. Apart from the fact that MSNBC has him on the payroll, the network is surely conscious of the risk it's taking in turning its whole prime time over to Keith and her. Poor Old Pat is there to provide balance -- and to give him credit, even in his dotage he does a better job of it than, say, the "liberals" who supposedly provide "balance" on Fox News.

Nevertheless, our Pat -- with that whine that's amplified into a roar, one of the odder modes of vocal delivery I've heard -- drives me nuts in a way that not many TV talking heads have since, well, old Bill Buckley, with his exaggeratedly patrician drawl.

But sure enough, on the special post-debate wrap-up edition of Countdown last night, there were Rachel and Uncle Pat squaring off. Pat was arguing that Obama has gone so cautious that he has failed to seal the deal, even with voters who may have decided to vote for him -- and I certainly can't say I entirely disagree with this. If it weren't said in that screechy roar-whine, I might even want to ponder his claim that Obama isn't going to win any kind of "mandate" in this election. (Yes, yes, we know that Tiny George Bush didn't have any electoral mandate in his stolen election "victories" and that didn't stop him from ruling like an emperor. But that doesn't make it right!)

But Poor Old Pat said something that gave me pause. He was talking about Obama's practice in the debate of reining in his positions, "moving to the center." Again, this is something that generally speaking we liberals have been bitching about throughout the campaign. On the question of abortion, though, when Rachel pointed out that Obama had tried to find some area of accomodation by pointing out that he would like to see fewer abortions, Poor Old Pat dismissed this as "standard boilerplate."

Which stuck with me. Why is it so difficult for Poor Old Pat to believe? Has he been roped in by Young Johnny McCranky's characteristically lying rhetoric? Young Johnny loves to pretend that there's a "pro-abortion" faction, people who want to promote abortions until everybody's had one, or more. There may in fact be people who like abortion, but they keep themselves well hidden. What many of us are is pro-choice, believing that there are cases where abortion is the least objectionable solution and therefore ought to be available as a free choice.

I suppose it's important to the Right to believe that it has some kind of high moral ground. They're the ones who should be calling themselves "anti-abortion," which accurately states their position. Instead they call themselves "pro-life," which is one of the vilest lies in the history of the human race. With the single exception of fetuses, the anti-abortion crowd is, for the most part, as bloody-minded a party of death as has ever existed.

Is it because of all the lies the anti-abortion movement is built on that it's so hard for someone like Poor Old Pat to believe that, really and truly, Barack Obama -- and a lot of the rest of us -- would like to see as few abortions as possible? We would just like that decision to rest where we think it properly belongs: with the woman.

And of course any woman, or any man for that matter, who saw young Johnny put those "air quotes" around "the health" of a woman who seeks an abortion as a medical necessity -- perhaps the most shameful moment of the most shameful national political campaign I've witnessed -- it should be perfectly and permanently clear that the Crankyman ought never to be permitted any say of any kind at any time in any matter in any way relating to any woman's health.

In the wake of his Obama endorsement, Christopher Buckley exits National Review, and the right-wing blood-letting is on

“You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.”

-- the late William F. Buckley Jr., as recalled by his son Christopher last week in his endorsement of Barack Obama

"The only thing the Right can’t quite decide is whether I should be boiled in oil or just put up against the wall and shot. Lethal injection would be too painless. . . .
"I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal. . . .
"I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of 'conservative' government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case."

-- Christopher Buckley, in a new column on The Daily Beast reporting his resignation as back-page columnist for the magazine founded by his father

by Ken

On Friday Howie passed on the news of Christopher Buckley's endorsement of Barack Obama on Tina Brown's Daily Beast webzine. Finding himself the object of a "tsunami" of online hatred at the National Review's website, Buckley has explained why he offered his resignation as back-page columnist to the current editor and publisher of the magazine that was founded by, and through most of its history was synonymous with, his father, the late William F. Buckley Jr., who as much as anyone deserves to be called the godfather of the modern American conservative movement.

But then, as Christopher Buckley pointed out in his Obama endorsement, the present-day version of that movement bears little resemblance to anything his father envisaged. In his Obama endorsement, Christopher recalled: "Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, 'You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.'”

Buckley Bows Out of National Review

by Christopher Buckley

Christopher Buckley, in an exclusive for The Daily Beast, explains why he left The National Review, the magazine his father founded.

I seem to have picked an apt title for my Daily Beast column, or blog, or whatever it’s called: “What Fresh Hell.” My last posting (if that’s what it’s called) in which I endorsed Obama, has brought about a very heaping helping of fresh hell. In fact, I think it could accurately be called a tsunami.

The mail (as we used to call it in pre-cyber times) at the Beast has been running I’d say at about 7-to-1 in favor. This would seem to indicate that you (the Beast reader) are largely pro-Obama.

As for the mail flooding into National Review Online -- that’s been running about, oh, 700-to-1 against. In fact, the only thing the Right can’t quite decide is whether I should be boiled in oil or just put up against the wall and shot. Lethal injection would be too painless.

I had gone out of my way in my Beast endorsement to say that I was not doing it in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column, because of the experience of my colleague, the lovely Kathleen Parker. Kathleen had written in NRO that she felt Sarah Palin was an embarrassment. (Hardly an alarmist view.) This brought 12,000 livid emails, among them a real charmer suggesting that Kathleen’s mother ought to have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a dumpster. I didn’t want to put NR in an awkward position.

Since my Obama endorsement, Kathleen and I have become BFFs and now trade incoming hate-mails. No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but it’s pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land. One editor at National Review -- a friend of 30 years -- emailed me that he thought my opinions “cretinous.” One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I have “betrayed” -- the b-word has been much used in all this -- my father and the conservative movement generally, said he plans to devote the rest of his life to getting people to cancel their subscriptions to National Review. But there was one bright spot: To those who wrote me to demand, “Cancel my subscription,” I was able to quote the title of my father’s last book, a delicious compendium of his NR "Notes and Asides": Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.

Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted -- rather briskly! -- by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.

My father in his day endorsed a number of liberal Democrats for high office, including Allard K. Lowenstein and Joe Lieberman. One of his closest friends on earth was John Kenneth Galbraith. In 1969, Pup wrote a widely-remarked upon column saying that it was time America had a black president. (I hasten to aver here that I did not endorse Senator Obama because he is black. Surely voting for someone on that basis is as racist as not voting for him for the same reason.)

My point, simply, is that William F. Buckley held to rigorous standards, and if those were met by members of the other side rather than by his own camp, he said as much. My father was also unpredictable, which tends to keep things fresh and lively and on-their-feet. He came out for legalization of drugs once he decided that the war on drugs was largely counterproductive. Hardly a conservative position. Finally, and hardly least, he was fun. God, he was fun. He liked to mix it up.

So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.

Thanks, anyway, for the memories, and here’s to happier days and with any luck, a bit less fresh hell.

By the way, you'll recall that Rich "Little Starbursts" Lowry, the National Review editor who accepted Buckley's resignation offer "rather briskly," is the selfsame imbecile who responded to the vice presidential debate with what may be the most achingly, humiliatingly imbecilic gibberish ever written by a human being who claims to think serious thoughts about, well, anything:

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.

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More Mainstream Republicans Deserting McCain: Michigan

topher

Gov William Milliken won't be campaign for McCain any longer

Two weeks ago DWT published a guest post by former Republican Congressman John Buchanan of Alabama explaining why he had changed his mind, after voting for McCain in the primary, and is now supporting Barack Obama. Congressman Buchanan mourned the loss of the "real" John McCain he liked and admired and wrote that he's "proving himself to be a very unfunny caricature" and "is using the same oft repeated big lie strategy of bearing  false witness against Obama that was used against him in 2000. The real John McCain was above such nefarious tactics. He would instead be running an honest and honorable campaign on the real and important issues our country faces in this election."

It was a big deal when former Michigan Governor William Milliken endorsed McCain in the Republican primary instead of Mitt Romney. This morning's Grand Rapids Press is reporting that Milliken, like mainstream Republicans all over America, is having buyer's remorse.

"He is not the McCain I endorsed," said Milliken, reached at his Traverse City home Thursday. "He keeps saying, 'Who is Barack Obama?' I would ask the question, 'Who is John McCain?' because his campaign has become rather disappointing to me.

"I'm disappointed in the tenor and the personal attacks on the part of the McCain campaign, when he ought to be talking about the issues."

...During a stop in Grand Rapids on Thursday, Lincoln Chafee, a former Republican U.S. senator from Rhode Island, said he's voting for Obama and urging others to do likewise.

McCain campaigned for Chafee's unsuccessful re-election bid in 2006, but Chafee said he is concerned McCain has swung to the right, a divisive strategy that could make it difficult for him to govern.

"That's not my kind of Republicanism," said Chafee, who now calls himself an independent. "I saw what Bush and Cheney did. They came in with a (budget) surplus and a stable world, and look what's happened now. In eight short years they've taken one peaceful and prosperous world, and they've torn it into tatters."

As for McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for his running mate, "there's no question she's totally unqualified," Chafee said.

And it isn't just Buchanan, Milliken and Chafee who are horrified at the transformation of John McCain into the disreputable troll we see on TV everyday. Michigan, in fact, is filled with them. Former state Senator Phil Arthurhultz, a Republican of Whitehall, is backing Obama and ex-Republican County Chair (Kent) Bob Eleveld, once the head of McCain's campaign in western Michigan, refuses to back McCain at all this year. "I'm not supporting either of them at this point," he said. "Suffice it to say there are a number of people who have been strong Republicans in the past, including party chairs, who feel as I do... I think the straight talk is gone. I think he's pandering to the Christian right. That's some straight talk from me."

Discord in the ranks couldn't come at a worse time for Bush congressional rubber stamps like Tim Walberg and Joe Knollenberg, two Michigan congressmen on the road to losing their seats. Both are down in the polls and are likely to be defeated by Mark Schauer and Gary Peters, both Democrats committed to supporting working families instead of narrow partisan agendas and the special interests of big campaign contributors.

One thing almost all Republicans abandoning McCain, or thinking of abandoning McCain, have in common is their utter disdain, if not outright contempt, for Sarah Palin. One McCain loyalist, Rep Ray LaHood (R-IL) told Chicago's biggest radio station, WBBM, that her 24/7 smear campaign could backfire on the GOP, "doesn't reflect the character of" Obama, and "doesn’t befit the office that she’s running for.  And frankly, people don’t like it.” (Funny how reluctant they are to question McCain's judgment and even his patriotism for this abysmal selection that so jeopardizes the country's well-being.) Actually what's left of the hatered-obsessed Republican does like it. It's what they are. LaHood is retiring but dozens of Republican politicians running for re-election are freaking out about McCain and Palin and the negative coattails that are likely to sink their own races. One of the most endangered Republicans in the Senate, Bush rubber stamp Gordon Smith of Oregon, resigned as chairman of McCain's Oregon campaign and actually uses Obama's photos in his campaign spots! He even tried insinuating that he and popular Oregon Senator Ron Wyden are "a team." Wyden responded to that yesterday:




UPDATE: WILLIAM F BUCKLEY'S SON CHRIS DUMPS McCAIN

In a bid to follow his father's advise of separating the Right from the kooks-- tough gig!-- Chris Buckley announced that he's voting for Obama.

I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times... a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t-- still-- doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.

McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam-- his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.

...He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain-- who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

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.