Conservative Backing Obama

Things just seem to get worse for John Sidney McCain with each passing day. The polls continue to widen with an ever increasing lead for Barack Obama. Some of those polls are now showing Obama with a double-digit lead. Now, a leading conservative voice has publically voiced his support for Obama.

Christopher Buckley, the son of legendary conservative William F. Buckley and a columnist for the conservative magazine National Review, announced on Friday that he will be voting Democratic for the first time in his life. He joked that, “It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup [sic] are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance."

This is a bit of a surprise. Earlier this year, Buckley had praised McCain and defended his conservative credentials against accusations from the Republican's base. So why did he change his mind? Here's what Buckley says:

"This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget 'by the end of my first term.' Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?"

But Buckley is not just voting against McCain. He is also voting for Obama. He went on to say, "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."

Those are devastating words for the McCain campaign -- especially coming from a conservative.