et tu, joe?

The conservative standard bearer, The Economist, came out today with their endorsement for President. As you might expect, they chose the socialist Barack Obama.

Ok, so maybe Obama isn’t a socialist after all.

And not only does The Economist support Obama for President, they say they do so “wholeheartedly.”

They also offer the reasons they aren’t supporting McCain. Most notably, they say, it’s because he’s no longer himself… Here’s a clip:

…Candidate McCain of the past six months has too often seemed the victim of political sorcery, his good features magically inverted, his bad ones exaggerated. The fiscal conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who denounced the religious right as “agents of intolerance” now embraces theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies (who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the right…

And the editors of The Economist weren’t alone. There were other high profile Republican defections this week, the most significant among them popular former Massachusetts governor William Weld, who said the decision was “close to a no-brainer.”

Personally, I didn’t think it could get any worse, but then I heard about Joe the plumber and what he just did to McCain in Ohio.

Et tu, Joe?