Puzzling through Prof. Kmiec's endorsement of Obama

This (by Pepperdine University Law Prof. Douglas W. Kmiec, a genuine legal star in the Reagan and Bush-41 Administrations) is the least persuasive and most hang-dog endorsement (of Barack Obama) that I've ever seen. If it were written in a newspaper, I'd have suspected that it had been butchered by the editors, and that they'd mistaken the substance for the fluff and mistakenly hacked out all of the former to meet some very sharp and arbitrary word-count. But this is a self-published post on Slate.com's new legal blog, "Convictions," so Prof. Kmiec lacks that excuse. We must grade his essay as if it were his best work, or at least his work (and not some editor's mangled version).

Objectively, he gets an F. In fact, were I his professor, I wouldn't even accept this as a completed assignment. Instead I'd return it to him with instructions that his endorsement must at least either (a) offer good reasons to vote for the candidate who he's endorsing or (b) offer good reasons to vote against the opponent of the candidate who he's endorsing. Prof. Kmiec has done neither.

Of Obama, Prof. Kmiec has nothing to point to but the very vaguest of hopes. He acknowledges that on a series of vital issues that are important to him (Kmiec), Obama stands philosophically opposed. The best Prof. Kmiec can hope for, as he acknowledges, is "that on each of these questions he is not closed to understanding opposing points of view and, as best as it is humanly possible, he will respect and accommodate them." This amounts to a naïve hope that after Obama has done his dead level best to thoroughly defeat Kmiec and everyone who shares Kmiec's positions, Obama won't be gratuitously insulting.

Of his (Kmiec's) own party's nominee, John McCain, not a single substantive word is spoken. Indeed, the name "McCain" appears only at the end, as part of an acknowledgment that Obama hasn't yet said anything to justify Kmiec's (or any conservative's, or any Republican's) confidence on foreign policy and national security:

Sen. Obama needs to address this extremist movement [i.e., radical Islamic ideology] with the same clarity and honesty with which he has addressed the topic of race in America. Effective criticism of the incumbent for diverting us from this task is a good start, but it is incomplete without a forthright outline of a commitment to undertake, with international partners, the formation of a worldwide entity that will track, detain, prosecute, convict, punish, and thereby stem radical Islam's threat to civil order. I await Sen. Obama's more extended thinking upon this vital subject as he accepts the nomination of his party and engages Sen. McCain in the general campaign discussion to come.

Doug: He's against the war. He wants to pull out immediately, ASAP. He's a Hard Left MoveOn.org Democrat on this issue, and if there's a single issue that defines him as a candidate and distinguishes him from the GOP's candidate, that's exactly it! What nuance are you waiting for from Sen. Obama that suddenly is going to persuade you that he's outlined a "commitment to [defeat] radical Islam's threat to civil order"?

In fact, the only glimpse of a rationale for Prof. Kmiec's endorsement is in this passage:

Our president has involved our nation in a military engagement without sufficient justification or a clear objective. In so doing, he has incurred both tragic loss of life and extraordinary debt jeopardizing the economy and the well-being of the average American citizen. In pursuit of these fatally flawed purposes, the office of the presidency, which it was once my privilege to defend in public office formally, has been distorted beyond its constitutional assignment. Today, I do no more than raise the defense of that important office anew, but as private citizen.

Okay, as Bush Derangement Syndrome goes, that's a pretty mild case, I suppose. And it certainly is possible to be a critic of the Bush-43 Administration's overall handling of the war in Iraq (we have to guess that that's what Prof. Kmiec was referring to, but maybe he actually meant Iraq and Afghanistan) while simultaneously recognizing that America continues to face real and grave threats from its terrorist enemies — threats that demand more than lip service (of the sort that characterized Clinton-42 and would characterize Clinton-44). Indeed, the most conspicuous example on the recent and current American political scene who's taken that position is ... Sen. John McCain.

If Prof. Kmiec believes that McCain is McSame, he hasn't persuasively argued that case. If Prof. Kmiec believes McCain is materially different than Dubya, he hasn't acknowledged that, nor offered any explanation for why those differences between McCain and Bush leave him still inclined to endorse Obama (whom he practically admits is an entirely unknown and unproven quantity in this area).

Having failed to do either, the only conclusion that can be drawn from Prof. Kmiec's essay is that he's a single-issue voter — re-elect or reject George W. Bush — in an election in which that won't be one of the choices.

Prof. Kmiec writes that he expects some of his friends to "see this as a matter of party or intellectual treachery." I don't think that's likely, at least not from those who give him due credit for his past and, hopefully, future service to America. All this endorsement essay amounts to is a personal repudiation of George W. Bush, and an admission that Prof. Kmiec, like so many others, has become swept up in Obama-mania — in this context, the romantic and entirely irrational belief that because Obama is a man of "integrity, intelligence, and genuine good will," he won't govern exactly like a Democrat from the south side of Chicago.

So: Of uncharacteristically unpersuasive writing on this one occasion, Prof. Doug Kmiec so far stands convicted. (I say "so far" because I hope that he may spontaneously recant — and when and if he does, I expect better, more persuasive prose from him then!) But "traitor"? No, why would one insist on that awful label, when one can't first rule out — and indeed, there appears to be a powerful case for — temporary insanity?