The son of conservative icon and National Review magazine founder William F. Buckley Jr. has endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for president. And he cites the nomination of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as Sen. John McCain's Republican running mate as a leading reason.

Christopher Buckley, a best-selling novelist, made the move public at The Daily Beast, a new Web site published by Tina Brown, the former New Yorker magazine editor.

"Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon," Buckley writes. "It's a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They'd cut off my allowance. Or would they?"

Buckley, who said he has known McCain personally since 1982 and once wrote a speech for him, pens a column for his late father's conservative magazine. But he said he wasn't endorsing Obama in his National Review space after the reception received by another columnist there who publicly criticized Palin.

"My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call 'the bleeding obvious,': namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that," Buckley said. "She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin 'a cancer on the Republican Party.'"

Parker has "to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster," he said.

Buckley said his late father once wrote, "I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks." And he praised Obama's books and education, and what he called the Illinois senator's "first-class temperament."

Obama has "the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for," Buckley said.

On National Review's blog, The Corner, Mark Steyn dealt with Buckley's comments lightly: Any Thoughts on This? My successor as NR's back-page columnist wanders off the reservation."

Buckley's late father also drew attention when he broke with his own magazine's conservative orthodoxy in February 2006 by writing, "One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed."

The McCain-Palin ticket, which McCain himself on Friday described as being behind in the polls, has amplified its personal attacks against Obama in recent days.

He and his vice presidential running mate, Sarah Palin, have suggested that Obama is hiding links to a '60s radical. Palin has sought to reinvigorate a debate over Obama's controversial former minister. A McCain supporter in Florida hurled a racial epithet at a black man in the press pool and demanded that he "sit down, boy." Palin supporters shouted "treason" as she talked about the Democrat. And former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, a co-chairman of Republican John McCain's presidential campaign, called Obama a "guy of the street."

The Illinois senator said on Friday that American's aren't looking for someone who can divide the country, but "they are looking for someone who can lead this country" through its current financial turmoil.

"Now more than ever it is time to put country ahead of politics," he said.