Lots of pundits are trying to figure out why President Obama is facing disaster this midterm election, but few have said it better than Michael Oakeshott, despite his disadvantage of having been dead for 20 years. Oakeshott was an English philosopher. His specialty was politics and his disposition was to prefer "fact to mystery," "the limited to the unbounded" and "present laughter to Utopian bliss." He said all this in an essay titled, "On Being Conservative," in which he also trenchantly described politicians of the opposite sort, what I would call the Obama sort. Such people, he said, see government...