Why some conservatives are backing Obama

Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau

(07-07) 04:00 PDT Washington -- The "Obamacans" that Sen. Barack Obama used to joke about - Republican apostates who whispered their support for his candidacy - have morphed into a new phenomenon, or syndrome, as detractors like to call it: the Obamacons.

These are conservatives who have publicly endorsed the presumptive Democratic nominee, dissidents from the brain trust of think tanks, ex-officials and policy magazines that have fueled the Republican Party since the 1960s.Scratch the surface of this elite, and one finds a profound dismay that is far more damaging to the GOP than the usual 10 percent of registered Republicans expected to switch sides during a presidential election.


"The untold story of the Bush administration is the deliberate annihilation of the Reaganite, small-government wing of the Republican Party," said Michael Greve, director of the Federalism Project at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. "A lot of people are very bitter about it."

Many conservatives and their brethren, the free-market, socially liberal libertarians, are deeply skeptical of Obama's rhetorical flirtations with free-market ideas and view his policies as orthodox liberalism. Yet one measure of their rupture with the GOP is their open disregard for Republican nominee John McCain and their now almost-wistful view of a president the Republicans tried to impeach.

"When he leaves the room, everybody thinks he just agreed with them," Greve said of Obama. "We don't know if you're really buying a pig in a poke here. It could be the second coming of the Clinton administration. If people have any confidence in that, I think a whole lot of conservatives would vote for him."

Such sentiments reflect a collapse of the "big tent" conservative coalition that Republican President Ronald Reagan forged in 1980, uniting free-market, small-government types, Christian evangelicals, cultural traditionalists and anti-communists, now called neoconservatives. The neoconservatives, whose intellectual leaders include New York Times columnist David Brooks and Weekly Standard publisher Bill Kristol, remain firmly inside the GOP and strongly back McCain, who appeals to their model of "national greatness." So do mainstream conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, which issues regular attacks against Obama's economic plans, and the traditionalist magazine National Review.

More?

Why some conservatives are backing Obama

Don't worry..be happy..all is not lost,at least not just yet.Bill Kristol is still on board with McCain

There are some Clinton supporters who have explicitly stated that they will jump Democrat ship because of the party backing Obama.

Polls between Clinton and Obama against McCain show Obama actually has an edge over Clinton. Obama's numbers are higher.
I suspect that the Clinton supporters who jump ship are matched by Republicans who support Obama. That would explain why Obama's numbers rise instead of fall when Clinton is switched out for Obama.