"The Scariest Thing About This Election..."

Funny thing about this year’s election.

You’d think that with the totally unique, almost surreal, cast of characters involved that I wouldn’t be able to find enough hours in the day to blog about it.

Turns out, at least in my mind, to be the total opposite.

Oh, not that I don’t have a rant or two up my sleeve.
I mean, come on.

But while I still want to think that I’m “non-partisan” enough to want to go down to the wire sifting through what McCain and Obama are offering before deciding on which way to choose, the aforementioned surreal nature of this thing makes it more likely that I will start to have a deep and abiding respect for the cultural contributions made in the past five years by Paris Hilton.

And while I pondered how to articulate my case while convincing those who know me well that it hasn’t been an inevitable decision all along, I found articulation for my own position in the most unexpected, not to mention ironic, place.

The words of a member of one of the most Republican families on the planet.

The son of William F. Buckley.

Christopher Buckley, the son of the late conservative icon William F. Buckley, said Friday he's decided to back Barack Obama's White House bid, the first time in his life he will vote Democrat.

“It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup [sic] are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance," Buckley, a columnist for the conservative National Review, wrote on the Web site The Daily Beast Friday.

Buckley, who praised McCain in a New York Times Op-Ed earlier this year and defended the Arizona senator's conservative credentials against wary talk-radio hosts, said McCain is no longer the “real” and “unconventional” man he once admired.

"This campaign has changed John McCain," Buckley wrote. "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," Buckley added. "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 made clear he's not just voting against McCain, praising Obama for his "first-class temperament and first-class intellect."

"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," Buckley wrote.

If you read closely enough between the lines, you’ll see that Chris really is trying to avoid saying, “I’m voting for the lesser of two evils”, but his meaning is clear.

And while I’m old and jaded enough not to see Barack Obama as the great black hope or the great white hope or the next John F Kennedy or any of the other hyperbolic sashes his starry eyed devotees want to drape around him, I find myself pretty much on the same page as Mr. Buckley.

Oh….and regarding the title of this little piece?

The thing that scares me the most about this election is that enough people will be unable to overcome their reservations, however fair they might be, about Obama that the Electoral College will put into the Oval Office that irascible, snarly, position changing, coherence lacking, unrealistic former first class temperament whose first really important decision was to choose a moose hunting Carol Brady to run for vice president with him.

Do I, for a single second, think that could really happen?

In a country that elected George W. Bush not once, but twice?

Uh…yeah.