Like father, like son. Well, maybe not.
On Friday, the satirist and conservative columnist Christopher Buckley bailed on Republican Sen. John McCain and endorsed his opponent in the presidential race, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama.
The endorsement made news, in part because Buckley is the son of the late William F. Buckley, the founder of the conservative National Review magazine who died in February.
Buckley himself underscored the connection by entitling his column posted on Friday’s The Daily Beast website, “Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama.”
Buckley joined a growing group of conservatives who have faulted the McCain campaign.
Nationally syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker and David Brooks of The New York Times have expressed concerns with McCain’s choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate.
William Kristol of the Times lamented McCain’s negative ads. And on Monday, Christopher Hitchens in Slate criticized both McCain and Palin and endorsed Obama.
In Buckley’s view, McCain has changed for the worse in the campaign, becoming “snarky,” making “unrealistic promises” and picking the wrong running mate.
Obama, Buckley contends, has the temperament and the intellect to be president.
While he chose to endorse Obama in his Daily Beast blog, Buckley also had been writing a column for The National Review for the last several issues.
In the wake of critical reaction from the right to his endorsement of Obama, Buckley told editors at the National Review that he was willing to resign from writing a column there.
The editors “rather briskly” accepted his offer, Buckley reported in a follow-up post Daily Beast post on Tuesday.
“The only thing the Right can’t quite decide is whether I should be boiled in oil or just put against the wall and shot. Lethal injection would be too painless,” Buckley wrote in describing the conservative reaction to his anti-McCain sentiments.
“I have been effectively fatwahed…by the conservative movement and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me,” he concluded.
In reality, Buckley and the magazine may not have been that close, even though Buckley remains a part owner and a member of the board.
He established his own reputation writing mostly satiric pieces in other magazines, especially The New Yorker. He’s been an editor for Forbes.
A former speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush (and at least once for John McCain), Buckley has also written several satirical novels, often focusing on political or government affairs.
His best-known work is probably Thank You for Not Smoking. His latest novel is Supreme Courtship.
Buckley, who is 56, has been in the news lately for a matter unrelated to politics. Irina Woelfle, the mother of a 7-year-old boy who Buckley fathered out of wedlock, has sued for increased child support.
In 2003, Buckley, who is married and the father of two adult children, agreed to pay $3,000 a month to Woelfle, his former publicist at Random House. He also declined visitation rights.
Woelfle contends that more child support is needed because her son has special needs and has to attend a private school.
Buckley, who stands to inherit millions when his father’s estate is settled, has declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Click here to sign up for the Muckety Newsletter
0 Comments
There are no comments yet, be the first by filling in the form below.
Leave a Comment