What's wrong with Christopher Buckley

I'm a huge fan of Christopher Buckley. My brother gave me a copy of "Steaming to Bamboola" in 1983 and I've loved his writing ever since. So I was taken aback by his decision to endorse Obama.

I just re-read his announcement on the Daily Beast, and it appears that the final deciding factor was Sarah Palin. He approvingly quotes Kathleen Parker's statement that Palin is "an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that." And he quotes New York Times columnist David Brooks who says that Palin is "a cancer on the Republican Party."

Why all this hostility? I think it's because Christo's background blinds him. Sarah Palin is a redneck, and not ashamed of it. And in the Buckley worldview, a redneck must be narrow-minded, ignorant, stupid, and not fit to lead.

Well, bucko, I'm from the deep South. I was born and raised in Baton Rouge. I went to a cow-college in North Louisiana. I now live in Durham, North Carolina - a surprisingly cosmopolitan town, but once you get a few miles out from Duke and the Research Triangle Park, you find a lot of salt-of-the-earth types. They are the tobacco farmers trying to figure out what will grow on those red-clay hills now that the demand for their product is in decline. They are the textile workers who are taking classes at the community college because the only job they are qualified for can be done in China at a lower cost.

And you know what? A lot of us Rednecks are smart. We might have gone to a cow-college, but we did go to college. We've read the classics, we eat sushi and appreciate a 2005 Bordeaux. We also know that there's a time for a cold PBR and a plate of barbecue. We can enjoy a monster truck rally and a ballet. And we know that Sarah Palin is one of us.

We hear liberals suggest that Palin isn't fit to be VP because she didn't have a passport until 2006. They seem to think that this suggests a lack of interest in the big, wide, world. But folks in the heartland know that a middle-class family with five kids struggle to even pay the application fee for a passport, forget about actually travelling abroad. Four out of five Americans don't own a passport. (That number may have gone down slightly in the past year, since we now need a passport for travel to Mexico and Canada.)

I think Christopher Buckley has let his Eastern Ivy-league education get the better of him. He thinks that "dumb redneck" is redundant. It isn't.