Why are some conservatives supporting Obama?

Over at Real Clear Politics, Thomas Sowell has some thought on the “conservatives for Obama” phenomenon. It’s partly sour grapes–John McCain is not the dream candidate, ergo some conservatives are planning–or say they are planning–to vote for someone who is closer to a conservative nightmare. And it’s partly wishful thinking. Conservatives point out  that Obama has been moving toward the center in his recent speeches, but it is (at best) a fantasy to  believe that what a man says is more important than what he does, and Obama has done plenty to belie his recent centrist noises. As usual, Sowell gets to the heart of the matter: “What is becoming ever more painfully apparent,” he writes,

is that too many people this year– whether conservative, liberals or whatever– are all too willing to judge Barack Obama on the basis of his election-year rhetoric, rather than on the record of what he has advocated and done during the past two decades.

Many are for him for no more serious reasons than his mouth and his complexion. The man has become a Rorschach test for the feelings and hopes, not only of those on the left, but also for some on the right as well.

Here is a man who has consistently aided and abetted people who have openly expressed their contempt for this country, both in words and in such deeds as planting bombs to advance their left-wing agenda.

Despite the spin that judging Obama by what was said or done by such people would be “guilt by association,” he has not just associated with such people. He has in some cases donated some serious money of his own and even more of the taxpayers’ money, as both a state senator in Illinois and a member of the Senate of the United States.

Read the whole thing here.