The campaign drags on - episodes like McCain accusing Obama of hating on Joe the Plumber merging with episodes like a reporter being kicked at a Palin rally, into a single tarry mass - bringing to mind the image from Yeats’ “Second Coming” of a “rough beast” “slouching” toward The End.

And as things veer increasingly toward the violent, the terrified, the siege mentality, another line from the poem echoes fearfully loud:

” The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

Indeed, there is too much passionate intensity among the racists, brutes and bullies. But do the best lack all conviction?

No. In fact, if anything, this fierce reaping has cast the best into relief, as they’re the ones the worst are pointing fingers at. Nowhere is this more evident than on the Right.

First it was Kathleen Parker, conservative columnist for the flagship of conservative publications, The National Review. Parker made waves recently by roundly criticizing Sarah Palin after the Couric interviews, and being reamed by an alleged “12,000 e-mails” and counting - ranging from declarations that she should have been aborted to denunciations of her as not a “true conservative,” and those are the nice ones, according to her.

So it was with a bit more discretion that libertarian leading light and heir to National Review founder William F. Buckley’s estate, Christopher Buckley, endorsed Obama. In his article, “Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama,” Buckley writes:

“Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.”

For any unconvinced conservatives out there who’ve soured on Obama, this sage, caustic man’s revolutionary appraisal of the candidate is an indispensable read.

The same can be said for the article about his subsequent denunciation by the right-wing and tense resignation from the magazine his father founded: “Sorry, Dad, I Was Fired”

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.

Has the modern “conservative” GOP abandoned its conservative roots, and with them, scholarship and intellect? Increasingly this seems so to me. And at the very least, Kathleen Parker argues in her article supporting Buckley’s self-sacrificing stance for his principles, it is separating those who suppress thought from those who champion it even in difficult times:

Radical conservatives are still having an interesting time of it, though these days they are being mutilated by fellow “conservatives.” The well-fed Right now cultivates ignorance as a political strategy and humiliates itself when its brightest sons seek sanctuary in the solitude of personal honor. … Republicans are not short on brainpower — or pride — but they have strayed off course.

How many brightest sons languish in self-exile, or after being swept to the margins? Certainly Frank Schaeffer, pro-life activist, and Douglas Kmiec, conservative legal eminence and acclaimed scholar, come to mind. Both have endorsed Obama as the sole, best hope of reducing abortions available to us, and both have been denounced by the rabble for it - Kmiec even being denied communion one occasion on the basis of that endorsement.

If we can put aside the divisions that old-time partisans have stoked for so long to our disadvantage, more people might see abortion as a product of societal indifference and individual callousness: the former exemplified by economic conditions ranging from inadequate wages to evictions traceable to the subprime fraud; the latter typified by a self-centeredness that sees children as competitors or enemies to personal fulfillment.

And certainly there are the others I have referenced in past posts.

No brightest son better embodies this phenomenon than the man who many expect will, come the end of next week or the week after, capture the news cycle with his endorsement of Obama: Collin Powell.

For many, Powell represents the wise, humble voice that tried to steer the Bush administration away from war and was instead shouted down by the arrogant, self-interested apparatchiks like Rumsfeld, Perle and Wolfowitz. He sullied his reputation for many at the UN, was ignominiously cashiered come the end of Bush’s first time, and as since been out of sight - like an old trophy commemorating the intellectual prudence and moral involvement of the Republican party, now gathering dust.

If all indications are correct, that trophy will soon come crashing down to seal the fate of bullying, gut-based conservatism. I eagerly await that.

The brightest sons and daughters want their party back. With voices like Parker, Buckley and Kmeic, they deserve it.

And all of us deserve a better President than the man who, once as fierce a critic of those “worst” among the right, now fights for them with the “passionate intensity” of desperation.

* UPDATE * The conservative Chicago Tribune just endorsed Obama, their first Democratic Party candidate endorsement in the 161 year history of the paper.

* UPDATE II * In Philadelphia, conservative Talk Radio host Michael Smerconish endorsed Obama on his show today, “for the first time since registering as a Republican 28 years ago … voting for a Democrat.”

Sarah Palin

* Frugality Lie: Sarah touts her reputation as someone who eliminated wasteful spending. She is about the only one in Alaska’s administrations that served with her that feels this way - namely the $50,000 redecoration of her office in Wasilla, the $20+ million she left Wasilla in debt and the exceptionally high level of earmarks she requested from the national tax payer.

* Bridge to Nowhere Lie: The bridge, which cost over $200 million, has been Palin’s showpiece for her frugality and hate of wastefulness. When she ran for governor, support of the bridge was her pet project - she even went so far as to weave it into speeches. She did turn it down, eventually when it became unpopular, but she kept the money the federal taxpayers gave her.

* Energy Supply Lie: Palin repeatedly claimed Alaska supplied 20% of the nation’s energy. She was only off by 16.5% - it supplies 3.5% of the United States’ domestically produced energy. That’s an exaggeration of only, oh, around %570.

* No Major Law Lie: Sarah likes to say Obama hasn’t authored “a single major law,” which is ridiculous, given that he has international WMD limitation, small arms limitation, government transparency legislation and international mission legislation all under his belt, just to name some of the ones he personally initiated and sponsored.

* Iraq Lie: Sarah said she visited Iraq. She got close. She visited Kuwait. They then clarified it. Then went back to the original version, where she visited the war zone.

* Private Chef Lie: Sarah claimed she dismissed the private chef. She didn’t. She just shifted the person to another part of the State’s service. Then, since she didn’t have a chef anymore, she began charging Alaska’s tax payers for her meals at home.

* eBay Plane Lie: Palin likes to repeat her yarn about selling the plane on eBay. It didn’t sell there, though; she eventually sold it for $600,000 less than the State had initially purchased it for to a major Republican contributor.

* Polar Bear Lie: In her Op-Ed strangely advocating that polar bears should not be protected as an Endangered Species, Palin cites that the state of Alaska did studies to support her assertion. Those studies actually contradict her, and she tried to suppress them.

* Troopergate Lie: After encouraging the investigation, Sarah then has used lawyers, witness suppression and personal evasion of subpoenas to block facts about her firing of a state trooper allegedly over a personal matter from coming to light.

Among the more gut-curdling and inhuman of Jerome Corsi’s repugnant distortions about Obama was the allegation that the Senator cast a vote for infanticide - a claim Corsi’s feckless partisan meat puppet of a show host, Sean Hannity, just nodded to; and a claim Corsi made on no less than three separate occasions, not counting his book.

Jerome Corsi, author of the book, The Obama Nation, falsely claimed on Hannity’s America that Sen. Barack Obama said, “Even if a child was born … the woman still had the right to kill the child in an abortion.” Corsi similarly falsely asserted on Hannity & Colmes that “[a]fter a child’s born, Obama … in the [Illinois] state Senate, wanted the child killed if the mother desired an abortion,” and on Sean Hannity’s radio program, said that “Obama’s on record as let’s kill the baby if that’s what the mother wants.” In fact, Obama has never supported giving people the right to kill their children.

Tragically, millions of Americans will likely not make the obvious assumption that such a claim is preposterous. Research shows that Corsi is being thoroughly mendacious - the law he refers to would not have defined what “born” or “alive” meant, while at the same time letting family members bring lawsuits against doctors they thought acted inadequately. It was bad law - either doomed to die quickly or to drag costly suits into its slow demise.

But this all raises the question, where does Obama stand on “life” and “choice” issues, and what, if anything, has he sought to do about them?

We are given a clearer perspective on the complexity of that answer by Obama’s handling of the Illinois Liability Law above. For Obama did support another bill, the Born Alive Act, that bestowed the full rights of a human being on a child born during the process of an abortion. In essence, it’s intent - protection of a born child - was the same, and of his interest.

Does this mean Obama is not in favor of unrestricted abortion rights? It may dismay progressives - or excite centrists and pro-lifers - to hear that he has supported banning various late-term procedures.

How does he maintain that 100% NARAL record, then? Obama has never failed to vote in support of a female individual’s right to the procedure. Yet he has claimed that the restriction of the procedure in the more gruesome instances is warranted and legal. And he has gone an extra step, taking the rhetoric he laid out in his political writings and incorporating them into the policy action of the party he had won the leadership of.

Obama, and key others in the Democratic Party and the former-GOP pro-life community, have lately strove to make abortion reduction a bi-partisan issue by putting it in the Democratic Party platform. Yes, it is now an official part of the platform to pursue the goal of reducing incidence of abortion. And, as I noted in a previous post, it is high time that they wrested this particular moral high ground from the tenuous, exploitative grasp of the GOP.

I say “exploitative,” because the GOP platform has been anti-contraception, anti-sex education, anti-natal welfare, anti-adoption, but fiercely and uncompromisingly anti-abortion. It smacks of callous calculation rather than actual concern that they have no real functional interest in preventing unwanted pregnancies or providing for the chaotic circumstances that afflict any unprepared mother, but are obsessively interested in the child when it’s in the mother. One may argue that the GOP does care about those other concerns, but it is hard to argue that their policies have made that care manifest in a way that helps.

the Republican line on abortion–the singular focus on banning it–was just a cynical ploy. I know that many GOP leaders were sincere, but overall the strategy was simply to oppose abortion symbolically while doing nothing to reduce abortions in real life. Moreover, there is evidence from history and from around the world that banning abortion would not even reduce abortions (have we ever banned anything successfully?).

Pro-life Christians are finally getting this.

This has left the “life” issue up for grabs: Not just “life” as defined as opposition to a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy, but “life” that can expanded to include care and respect for all phases of the process - for the sexually active girl or woman, for the life whose fate depends on her, and for the child that must be cared for all the more after its born. And this is what the 2008 platform seeks to achieve.

The effect would be profound, in that it would turn an issue that has only been useful as partisan demonization - and hardly for limiting abortions - and transform it into a bipartisan call to provide actual care for all life. If Obama is both sincere and committed to the causes he has been bold enough to speak on extensively and candidly in the past, especially in his writing, the Republican wedge issue that only fosters the problem may be turned into an urge to support Democratic social aid programs.

Can Obama speak strongly enough to be considered sincere? All indications are that he will do just that tomorrow at the Faith Forum to be held at the Saddleback mega-church. It falls to him to not only regurgitate the Clinton-era idiom of “safe, legal and rare” about abortion, but to synthesize the effort to actually reduce abortions with the earnest concern for all life.

I trust he won’t disappoint. Obama devotes a whole chapter of Audacity of Hope to the subject. There is no doubting his depth of consideration, feeling and concern; he at one point compares the guilt of some women over their past abortions to that of former slave holders - clearly he recognizes the severity of the decision involved. And that he, not McCain, is a zealous Evangelical Christian, gives him additional premium to his claim of spiritual investment in a better life.

Today, Matthew 25 - a progressive Christian group central to the nascent efforts like those above - released a commercial for Obama.

It is the organization’s title - the Biblical passage that says that those who don’t just bide time in this life, but work at charity, are saved, and any who do less are damned - that resonates with Obama’s faith. He has been an activist for the poor, the disadvantaged and the denounced on both sides of the political spectrum. There is no doubt that he struggles for the least of us.

We’ll see what stand he takes for “the least among” the pro-life movement tomorrow.

Evangelical Reverend Jim Wallis called on the Obama camp yesterday to make reduction of abortions a plank in this election, and so extended an olive branch from the pro-life community that Obama should seize for the good of his campaign and the good of the country.

“Abortion reduction should be a central Democratic Party plank in this election,” Wallis told ABC News. “I’ll just say that flat out.”

This gives Obama an opportunity unique for Democratic candidates for nearly thirty years, and critical to his mission of overcoming bi-partisanship: The chance to demonstrate that Democrats and the pro-choice community are not only not in favor of abortions, but that they have the best solutions at reducing them.

The former concern is important because for too long, pro-choice has been painted as some kind of malignant “anti-life,” with Democrats seemingly heartless to the genuine moral discomfort held by many about abortions. As the opponents of Roe v. Wade shower all those they can with the worse excesses of abortion - from unnecessarily brutal procedures, twisted bureaucracies and callous expectant mothers - the Democrats have done nothing to prove them wrong. They have instead robotically defended the absolutism of the system as it stands - not only of choice, but of every aspect of the current system.

This has, arguably rightly, made them seem entirely divided from the concerns of those who want something to be done to limit either the forms or frequency of abortions. And that has not only widened the divide between the right-wing and the left. For some voters, it is the very essence of the divide.

How many Catholics or Evangelicals resolve their struggle with the issue of abortion by turning from the doctrinaire left? In turn, the right has used this wedge issue to win votes for all manner of causes that have nothing to do with abortion - many of which could be argued as contrary to a genuine concern for all life being cared for by the state.

Thus the right has been able to claim, with some credence, that the left does not care about people’s qualms about abortion. And the left has been able to claim, with some credence, that the right does not care about life once it’s born.

Obama’s embrace of the challenge to reduce abortions can mend that divide, and so mend one of the deepest and most significant schisms in the modern political terrain.

Beyond the matter of healing the American body politic, there is the additional advantage that the Democrats’ platforms actually can reduce abortions more effectively than the GOP’s stock solutions.

Nothing prevents abortions better than preventing unwanted pregnancies - a solution even superior to simply making the procedure illegal. And nothing prevents unwanted pregnancy better than birth control.

Abstinence-only education has been a hallmark of the Bush administration and the Religious Right, and it has been a disaster. For those not versed in these programs, the vast majority (of the top thirteen programs, eleven, serving 158 out of 168 educational facilities) are not only are sporadically riddled with scientific inaccuracy and barbaric gender notions, but all must also actively discourage contraception. Such as, under the HHS grant system, ‘SPRANS,’ which has received the most funding:

“Under the SPRANS requirement, abstinence-only education programs are not allowed to teach their participants any methods to reduce the risk of pregnancy other than abstaining until marriage. They are allowed to mention contraceptives only to describe their failure rates.”

Given that they do nothing to limit actual frequency of teen sex, that means these programs aren’t scaring kids away from sex, just from condom use and disease-free sex.

The numbers bear this out, as small states and southern states with the most conservative social attitudes top the chart for teen pregnancies, six of them even passing California in terms of gross total. Should Obama bravely and intelligently link these facts with the cause of a common will to reduce abortions, we’ll not just see a healthier political climate, but a healthier nation as well.

He should make condom distribution and sex education hallmarks of this new “pro-life” movement. He should rally those “in it for the babies” to start fighting for rights, funding and programs for single mothers, young mothers, struggling mothers. He should advocate adoption while expressing respect for the personal liberty of the woman as an American citizen, informed and capable of making her own decisions about her body.

He should, in essence, turn the powers of the federal government and the will of the pro-life cause to the effort of truly improving and respecting all life, in all stages: The expectant mother as well as the unexpected child; the sexually active woman as well as the financially helpless single mother; the mothers who are barely more than children themselves as well as the children of those who society must bear the cost of supporting.

Only this would qualify as a true American pro-life movement. And right now, only Obama can create it.