yesterday on my way home from work

i was listening to npr (as i normally do. only that or college stations. NEVER 'regular radio'). it was the tail end of a political show. some republicans were on. what was unusual was they were saying they were going to vote for barack obama. i also heard a few callers say the same thing as well. the callers were disenfranchised with the way mccain's/sarevil's campaigns were going. the callers said they were sick of the negativity. they wanted mccain to talk more about the issues than what was wrong with the 'man' barack obama. they had no problems with mccain tearing obama's POLICIES apart, just NOT the man. i was quite heartened to hear them all.

First Colin Powell, Now…

george packer

Ken Adelman is a lifelong conservative Republican. Campaigned for Goldwater, was hired by Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity under Nixon, was assistant to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld under Ford, served as Reagan’s director of arms control, and joined the Defense Policy Board for Rumsfeld’s second go-round at the Pentagon, in 2001. Adelman’s friendship with Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their wives goes back to the sixties, and he introduced Cheney to Paul Wolfowitz at a Washington brunch the day Reagan was sworn in.

In recent years, Adelman and his friends Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz fell out over his criticisms of the botching of the Iraq War. Still, he remains a bona-fide hawk (“not really a neo-con but a con-con”) who has never supported a Democrat for President in his life. Two weeks from now that’s going to change: Ken Adelman intends to vote for Barack Obama. He can hardly believe it himself.

Adelman and I exchanged e-mails today about his decision. He asked rhetorically,

Why so, since my views align a lot more with McCain’s than with Obama’s? And since I truly dread the notion of a Democratic president, Democratic House, and hugely Democratic Senate?

Primarily for two reasons, those of temperament and of judgment.......