Today I must write about the impending defeat of Senator John McCain.

"That it impends is a matter of objective judgment. That it will happen is, of course, not certain; it was not certain, after all, that the French would not defeat King Harry at Agincourt, but defeat most certainly impended, as it does today."

I having taken that most appropriate quote from the original reading copy that my friend, William F. Buckley, Jr. used when he addressed the national convention of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) in 1964. It lies on my desk now, its yellowed pages filled with agonized edits from the master’s hand. Ever the politician, when he asked me beforehand, I advised Bill not to take this defeatist tact, but he felt that he had to speak the truth against a future day.

In that address, before the fourth annual convention of YAF at the Commodore Hotel in New York City on September 11, 1964, Buckley, the acknowledged founder of the modern conservative movement, spoke of the coming defeat of another senator from the State of Arizona — Barry Goldwater.

As national chairman of YAF I introduced Bill, and I recall that Buckley’s performance was masterful, though sitting next to him as he spoke, I could see he was nervous, perspiring and periodically clenching his jaw.

He gently reminded that young audience of true believers that not all causes are fought for the present, that conservatism, if it teaches anything, teaches patient veneration of  proven principles. He told us the fight would be long and difficult, but that we must not be demoralized by what  history would surely view, as it ultimately did, as only a temporary setback for conservatism in America.

President Obama?

It appears that a majority of American voters are about to elect as President of the United States, the most far left, liberal candidate ever to aspire to that high office.

I have no desire to catalogue in detail this man’s relatively little known political philosophy. Despite the millions of words, I doubt that few people could define him with any certainty — which is just as he wants it.

His glib tongue and expert political instincts, his skillful Chicago pol machine managers, plus millions of dollars, have combined to create an image of a nice young man, a putative savior for America and the world beyond. That his stated redistributionist, welfare state, views do indeed equate with socialism, is lost on the cheering throng. (Then too, who are Republicans to criticize, having imposed the horrendous financial fascism of the recent bankers’ and billionaires’ bailout).

Over many months in this blog I have described in detail Senator Obama’s politically calculated assaults on the free market, his specific plans to curb Americans’ present freedom to bank and do business offshore. Others have exposed his phony tax cuts (read back to welfare) for "95% of Americans" as a re-tread of the late Senator Huey Long’s "Share the Wealth" hokum. As with the King Fish, this is economic demagoguery at its glittering, crowd-pleasing best. Impressive, perhaps, except to the perceptive Joe the Plumber and his clan.

A Manchurian Candidate?

Certainly no one should ever accuse the cerebral senator of being a brainwashed Manchurian candidate, but I doubt that Obama himself knows what his oft repeated catchwords of "hope" and "change" will really mean in practical terms.

One assumes we will all find that out if (or when) he and his liberal Democrat colleagues control the levers of government. The possibility is of a Democratic House with a bigger, more fervent majority; a Democratic Senate with the same, and possibly with a filibuster-breaking 60 seats; a new and popular Democratic president, elected by a few points or more; a Democratic leftist base whose anger and hunger have built for eight years; Democratic and union activists and operatives hungry for action.

I don’t care to engage in pointless conjecture as to whether Obama will lurch hard Left, or steer to the Center, looking towards a second term. His record of personal 20-year association with a violently anti-American black power preacher, with convicted bomb throwing terrorists and other questionable hard Left types offers little encouragement that the Senator from Illinois will experience a Saul-like miraculous conversion on the Road to Washington.

We can only pray.

Americans Are Conservative

I do know, after all these years, both as an active participant and observer of American politics and government, that Americans as a whole are a conservative, centrist people. But eight years of the Bush disaster has deflected that innate conservatism towards "change". If Obama ignores that consrvatuve reality, should he triumph on Tuesday, he will guarantee a presidential path that will be difficult at best.

According to a Newsweek poll, nearly twice as many people call themselves conservatives as liberals (40% to 20%), and Republicans have dominated presidential politics for 40 years. Since 1968, Democrats have won only three of 10 general elections (1976, 1992 and 1996), and in those years they were led by Southern Baptist nominees who ran away from the liberal label.

I think "conservative" can be defined as valuing establish custom over radical change, opposing the expansion of the state, and as shunning those who are condescending about matters of religious faith, the right to life, patriotism and culture.

Across Generations

At Georgetown School of Foreign Service we were assigned the classic 1948 book "The American Political Tradition," by Richard Hofstadter. In that book he quotes a great American writer whom I had the honor to know, John Dos Passos: "In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present."

I have no doubt that, should Obama win, the pundits and prognosticators on the Left will immediately, Tuesday night, proclaim that the "conservative era" has ended in America. But the conservative movement that began in 1956 with Bill Buckley’s National Review, championed by the 1964 foot soldiers of YAF, personified in its early days by Barry Goldwater and later by Ronald Reagan’s revolution — that movement will never end.

The Remnant

One of Bill Buckley’s favorite political philosophers (mine also) was the late Albert Jay Nock, who in 1936 wrote an essay entitled Isaiah’s Job in which he described those true believers who will always carry on the good fight: "There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society."

You can count those of us at the Sovereign Society to be an active part of that remnant, as indeed we always have been.

Principles in Common?

As Jon Meacham wrote recently in Newsweek: "Hofstadter encapsulated the center-right point about the country better than most, writing: "The sanctity of private property, the right of the individual to dispose of and invest it, the value of opportunity, and the natural evolution of self-interest and self-assertion, within broad legal limits, into a beneficent social order have been staple tenets of the central faith in American political ideologies; these conceptions have been shared in large part by men as diverse as Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Bryan, Wilson, and Hoover."

The question is whether the political enigma that is Barack Obama shares those traditional American beliefs.