Monday, July 7, 2008

Conservatives Backing Obama

An increasing number of disaffected Republicans fed up with what they see as President Bush's broken promises and unimpressed with John McCain say they may be switching teams in November to vote for Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

Among the reformed righties now hoping for an Obama victory are free-market economist David Friedman, former Reagan aide Douglas Kmiec, Contract With America co-author Larry Hunter and Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of the former president.

Bush's "view of the legitimate power of the executive branch, including the authority to deliberately violate federal law, I find frightening," Friedman, son of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman tells the San Francisco Chronicle. "Perhaps, if we are lucky, Obama will turn out to be the anti-Bush."

"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."

"I do know libertarians who think Obama is the Antichrist, that he's farther left than John Kerry, much farther left than Bill Clinton, and you'd clearly have to be insane to vote for this guy," David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute, tells the Chronicle. "But there are libertarians who say, 'Oh yeah? Do you think Obama will increase spending by $1 trillion, because that's what Republicans did over the past two presidential terms. So really, how much worse can he be?' And there are certainly libertarians who think Obama will be better on the war and on foreign policy, on executive power and on surveillance than McCain."

rawstory.com

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