The Conservative Soul

I love me some Andrew Sullivan.  He writes and thinks beautifully.  (He, as well as several others, write their blogs the way I am struggling to write mine -- in an unfettered fashion.)  What conservative hinterlands there are in my soul, he speaks to them.  He's made me come to the opinion that there's a difference between being a conservative and being a Republican.  On payday, I'm getting his book The Conservative Soul to figure out why he, a gay, British born man, is conservative to his bones.  I don't get it, but I'm fairly certain he will explain it in a way that I will at least appreciate.

I write him a lot.  He even answered me once.

In a post today, he tells of his attempts to write his endorsement of Sen. Obama, but discovers that an article written a year ago does a good job of it:

If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one ... if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong ...

But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

Yeah, I love me some Andrew Sullivan.