More Obamacans Jump on theBandwagon

Barack Obama keeps on gaining consent from his right wing. After the ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell, now it’s time for Ken Adelman, the hawk-eyed neocon who had foreseen a “cakewalk” for American Marines in Iraq, to rally with the Democratic candidate. Rumsfeld ex-adviser and Wolfowitz friend, Adelman became a noisy critic of both Rumsfeld and Bush regarding Iraq and now his endorsement of Obama (in an interview to The New Yorker’s blog) extends the list of conservatives who decided to leave McCain’s camp and join the Democratic candidate.

From Colin Powell to Christopher Buckley, from Andrew Sullivan to Christopher Hitchens, the consistent group of Obamacans doesn’t make a homogeneous and ideologically united movement. It’s not like the liberal/neocon group, which at the end of the 70s left the Democratic Party to influence the conservative world, but it describes Obama’s success better than any poll.

Neocon and Paleocon, hawks and doves, the Obama wave seems unstoppable. Another supporter is Judith Miller, the New York Times journalist just hired by Fox News, who spent time in jail during the Plame Affair and in 2002, wrote a number of articles about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, which were never found afterwards. Obama also convinced the conservative major of London, Boris Johnson, and Republican ex-deputy Mark Foley, the one who two years ago, on the eve of the elections of half-mandate, resigned because he was sexually flirting with an underage intern (but later into the evening he denied this).

In Oregon there is a Republican candidate to Congress, Joel Haugen, who sides with Obama and not with McCain, while the Conservative Senator Gordon Smith seeks his re-election by praising his friendship with Obama in TV spots. Twenty-six local newspapers, which in 2004 sided with Bush, this time, chose Obama. This include the Chicago Tribune, which in its long history has never sided with a Democratic candidate, while there are only four newspapers that in 2004 planned to vote for Kerry and now support McCain.

There are antiabortionists for Obamaa too (proLifeproObama.com), guided by the ex-legal adviser of Ronald Reagan, Douglas Kmiec. This despite Obama being an earnest supporter of women’s right to stop pregnancy and being accused by conservatives of being the most pro-choice candidate ever. In his Govern Program (approved at the Denver Convention) for the first time since 1992 there isn’t the key sentence of the Democratic thought about abortion: “abortion must be legal, safe” but also “rare”. Obama’s strength – in this subject as in any other – is him not being considered a radical fanatic, but him being interested in other’s ideas even without agreeing with them. This attitude isn’t well liked by the extreme left wing (Noam Chomsky said he will vote for Obama only because he’s the lesser of the two evils), but it allows Obama to gain consensus to the extent that The Politico said there is a “Racist for Obama” group, too.

In September (when McCain was leading) a national poll revealed that 23% of the electors who think Afro-Americans use the racial discrimination to justify their own wrong behavior, will vote for Obama. The New York Times reported that there were no violent and racist episodes connected to Obama’s candidacy, and James Knowles, a Ku Klux Klan member convicted for lynching in 1981, said that Obama “is a potentially acceptable candidate.”