Kenneth Adelman - Support For Barack Obama

Support For Barack Obama

The New Yorker reported on October 20, 2008, that Kenneth Adelman decided to buck his conservative leanings and vote for Senator Barack Obama for President on November 4, 2008. According to the New Yorker, Adelman made his decision "rimarily for two reasons, those of temperament and of judgment." He explained:

When the economic crisis broke, I found John McCain bouncing all over the place. In those first few crisis days, he was impetuous, inconsistent, and imprudent; ending up just plain weird. Having worked with Ronald Reagan for seven years, and been with him in his critical three summits with Gorbachev, I’ve concluded that that’s no way a president can act under pressure.

Second is judgment. The most important decision John McCain made in his long campaign was deciding on a running mate.

That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office—I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign—Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.

Soon after he authored a Huffington Post article entitled Why a Staunch Conservative Like Me Endorsed Obama where he wrote, "Granted, McCain's views are closer to mine than Obama's. But I've learned over this Bush era to value competence along with ideology. Otherwise, our ideology gets discredited, as it has so disastrously over the past eight years." He added, "McCain's temperament -- leading him to bizarre behavior during the week the economic crisis broke -- and his judgment -- leading him to Wasilla -- depressed me into thinking that "our guy" would be a(nother) lousy conservative president. Been there, done that."

A Reuters article quotes Adelman as saying I am a Republican and only voted for one Democrat in my entire life, and that was very much an anti-McCain vote. I thought Obama was going to be better than he turned out to be. Reuters also states that he was backing Romney.