Pat Dollard | Young Americans

WASHINGTON — With an eye to the general election and the Pennsylvania primary, some Republicans who oppose President Bush’s war policy are endorsing Senator Obama.

Call them the Obamacans: They are against continuing the Iraq war and reject what they see as Mr. Bush’s unconstitutional buildup of executive power. While the conservative Republican base rejected Senator McCain in the early primaries for his push for bipartisan campaign finance regulation and amnesty for illegal immigrants, the Arizona senator’s hawkish support for the Iraq war has alienated what was once his national constituency, anti-Bush Republicans.

The Obamacans include a former senator of Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee; a former senior Justice Department official under President Reagan and senior legal adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, Douglas Kmiec, and a granddaughter of President Eisenhower, Susan Eisenhower.

The group one day may include Senator Hagel, a Republican of Nebraska, who has co-sponsored Iraq withdrawal legislation with leading Democrats. Asked yesterday on CNN whether he would endorse his party’s presumptive nominee, Mr. Hagel said he would base his support on the candidates’ positions on withdrawing from Iraq.

The Illinois senator’s appeal to anti-war Republicans likely will affect the outcome of the upcoming primaries, especially Pennsylvania, where conservatives are being urged by radio host Rush Limbaugh to vote tactically for Senator Clinton in an effort to prolong the fight for the Democratic nomination.

Of the 140,000 Pennsylvania Republicans and independents who switched registration in the last year to Democrat, the majority are Obama voters, the director of the Franklin and Marshall College poll, G. Terry Madonna, said. Registration for the state’s closed April 22 primary ended March 24. “If 2 million people vote in Pennsylvania, which would be a huge number, I think Obama gets 85,000 to 90,000 switchers,” Mr. Madonna said. “That’s 3 or 4 or 5%, which is a big deal.”

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Mr. Kmiec, a senior adviser to Mr. Romney’s presidential campaign before his withdrawal from the race in February, said Mr. Obama could create a reverse Reagan effect and attract anti-war Republicans in the same way President Reagan won the support of Democrats wary of their party’s soft line on the Cold War, management of the economy, and embrace of identity politics.

“People have asked, ‘How can someone who worked for Ronald Reagan support Barack Obama?’” Mr. Kmiec said in an interview. “And the answer is simple: Both are natural leaders and have a great gift for communicating. Ronald Reagan used to tell me that his greatest achievement was to make Americans feel good about themselves again. But there has to be a genuine reason to feel good about ourselves, which there hasn’t been in a while.”

Mr. Kmiec added that Mr. Obama “is calling us to what Ronald Reagan called us to, which is the better nature of our capacities and ourselves.”

Another alumnus of the Reagan Justice Department, however, said he doubts that many conservatives and Republicans will defect to the Obama campaign.

“I think this is a lot of nonsense,” Mark Levin, who served as chief of staff to Attorney General Meese and now hosts a nationally syndicated talk radio program, said. “I don’t see a lot of movement of Republicans or conservatives to Barack Obama. Whether or not they vote for McCain, though, is another story. It will be clear by then that Obama’s agenda is an extremely hard left agenda on domestic and foreign policy. It will be clear the courts will be in great danger. Once all that crystallizes, and it will, he may get the usual Republicans who are not that serious, but it won’t be enough to matter.”

The latest Rasmussen poll has Mr. McCain at 51% against Mr. Obama, who polls at 41%. According to a Gallup survey from early March, 28% of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters would vote for Mr. McCain instead of supporting Mr. Obama in the general election.

But those numbers come in the middle of the most contested Democratic presidential primary since Hubert Humphrey took on Eugene McCarthy in 1968. In Pennsylvania, where campaigning has been heated, Mrs. Clinton on average enjoys a lead of more than 17%. She also has the support of the Democratic governor, Edward Rendell, and the Democratic mayors of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Michael Nutter and Luke Ravenstahl.

In this environment, the Republicans who support Mr. Obama may make a difference. Since January, 98,840 Republicans and independents have changed their party affiliation, according to the latest statistics from the Pennsylvania Department of State. “We have seen one of the highest — if not the highest — number of people switch from one party to another in one week, the week leading up to the deadline: 29,060 who switched to the Democratic Party from March 17 to March 24,” a spokeswoman for the department, Rebecca Halton, said in an interview. New, revised tallies are scheduled to be released today.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign in Pennsylvania is touting the endorsements of some Pennsylvania Republicans. One is Lou Thieblemont, former mayor of Camp Hill, Pa., population 8,000, a suburb of the state capital, Harrisburg.

In an interview, Mr. Thieblemont, a former pilot for TWA and American Airlines, said proudly that he has never voted for a Bush. “Since I was able to vote at 18, I didn’t vote for any Bush,” he said. “I voted for Reagan, I voted for Dole, but never a Bush. I don’t like the way they do business.”

Another Pennsylvania Republican who supports Mr. Obama is retired Major General Walter Stewart, a township supervisor in Burks County who says he has given money both to an anti-Bush Texas Republican, Rep. Ron Paul, and Mr. Hagel, who he said was his first choice for president this election season.

General Stewart said he was supporting Mr. Obama because he could not endorse a candidate who voted to authorize the war in Iraq, which he compared to King George’s decision to send the British army and Hessian mercenaries into New York Harbor in the Revolutionary War. In 2004, General Stewart said, he supported Mr. Kerry, the Democratic nominee, over Mr. Bush. “I think there is a general feeling in the military that this war in Iraq has been a catastrophe,” he said.

A spokesman for the Pennsylvania Republican Party, Michael Barley, said the elevated number of party switchers was expected, given the national attention his state’s primary has received. “There is a lot of attention on this race. If we had a contested primary on the Republican side, we would expect our rolls to increase by similar margins as the Democrats. They have gained a pretty substantial amount of voters for the last few months,” he said.

(Read full NY Sun article by Eli Lake here)