A reader writes:
I don’t know what’s causing you to abandon your conservatism of doubt, but there’s no doubt that’s what you’re doing. Take, for instance, this unilluminating piece of credulity:
He obviously does care about working class voters, white and black. Why else would an Ivy League educated lawyer return to Chicago to work as a community organizer for the urban poor?
As an earlier, less starstruck, Andrew might have said, "please." This is a classic case of theoretical under-determination. Why might Obama have returned to work as an organizer in a community that became his earliest constituency? Sure, it could be because he "cares about working class voters, white and black." But it also could be because the precinct in which he worked was optimally suited to elect him, a left-wing black, to political office.
Or because community organizers have the time to write books. Or because he figured an intelligent community organizer could easily make the leap to influential local academic. Or, for that matter, because his wife made him do it.
See, what distinguishes a "conservative of doubt" from a hack is his doubt: his refusal to accept the rosiest picture, his acknowledging that politicians invariably act out ulterior motives, and that the ones who should be vetted most closely are those who seem most lily-white. Is the conservative of doubt realistic? No, he doubts — he is skeptical — but he understands that political errors are most likely to be avoided when the question is not, say, "who is best suited to lead this country?" but, rather, "who is the least worst suited?" This perspective does not preclude him from making optimistic inferences from the evidence; a conservative of doubt can still judge that Obama would be a thoughtful, even-keeled president, or that John McCain is an honorable man, but the onus is on Obama to be extra-thoughtful, and McCain to be extra-scrupulous.
That’s why the foregoing excerpt belies your low ‘c’ conservatism. The evidence from which you infer that Obama cares about the white and black urban poor supports many other hypotheses, all of which attribute to Obama a less virtuous character. The conservative of doubt would provisionally accept any one of these before he endorsed the hypothesis you settled on.
This is a plausible explanation. But my point was made in reference to the assertion, without evidence, that Obama does not care about working class folks. And Clinton did not argue that Obama’s record in this respect was merely careerism. He implied total unconcern. At some point, you cannot surrender to total cynicism about people in public life. But I take the point that I need to remind myself of the need for skepticism toward a candidate I have come to admire. I will merely remind my reader that so far, my support for Obama has been in the context of the Democratic primary.
The Dish 