Quotes of the Day: Noonan, Will, Brooks, and Gerson take down The Newt

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The campaign to destroy Newt Gingrich, or at least his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, is well underway.

It's coming from renegades like Ron Paul (who's obviously acting on his own), Capitol Hill establishment types like Pete King (who's obviously playing his part in a more organized campaign), Romney surrogates like Chris Christie (who's obviously doing his pal's bidding), and, of course, from big-time conservative pundits who can see clearly that Newt, an unprincipled egomaniac, would be a disaster for the GOP. For example:

Peggy Noonan: "He is a human hand grenade who walks around with his hand on the pin, saying, 'Watch this!'"

George Will: "There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrich's unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages."

David Brooks: "[Newt] has every negative character trait that conservatives associate with '60s excess: narcissism, self-righteousness, self-indulgence and intemperance. He just has those traits in Republican form."

Michael Gerson: "Gingrich's language is often intemperate. He is seized by temporary enthusiasms. He combines absolute certainty in any given moment with continual reinvention over time."

Can you smell the fear? Can you sense the panic? If conservatives of this caliber are going after Newt with such aggressiveness, it's only because he's become such a formidable frontrunner, and because he's gaining such momentum that he may very well be approaching the realm of inevitability.

Brooks and undone

By Zandar

I didn't think it would take very long, but just a month after ripping into the Tea Party over holding the country hostage on the debt ceiling, it looks like David Brooks has returned to form, chasing the shiny object known as Rick Perry's Inconsequential America:

The events of 2009 and 2010 also concentrated the Republican mind. It used to be that there were many themes in the Republican hymnal. Now there is only one: Government is too big, and it needs to be brought under control. It used to be there were many threats on the horizon. Now there is only one: the interlocking oligarchy of politicians, academics, journalists, consultants and financiers who live along the Acela corridor want to rip America from its traditional moorings.

Well, there's the first point. Brooks doesn't try to hide the fact that the modern GOP cares only about reducing government power to give more to corporations... at least the corporations that seem to think government is the source of all evil. Second, Brooks freely admits the goal of this maneuver is to attack "the oligarchy" (which Brooks of course is not a part of, he swears!) This really means "pissing off liberals." That's it. And Perry's the man for the job:

Perry is benefiting from these shifts. He does best among the most conservative voters. He has a simple and fashionable message: I will bring government under control. His persona is perfectly tuned to offend people along the Acela corridor and to rally those who oppose those people. He does very well with the alternative-reality right — those who don't believe in global warming, evolution or that Obama was born in the U.S.

So, yes, it is time to take Perry seriously as a Republican nominee and even as a potential president. Until a few weeks ago, Perry trailed Obama in general election matchups. But as Perry's name recognition has increased, that has changed. He and Obama are neck and neck in a recent Gallup poll.

Boy, where to begin... really, the entire column boils down to David Brooks admitting that Rick Perry may very well end up our next president, and then completely ignoring the role of Villagers like himself in creating the Republican "alternative reality right" monster in the first place. Even worse is that he freely admits the issue and then chooses to do nothing to correct it, he just accepts the fact that Rick Perry could get elected because he pisses liberals off and is from Texas, which is all that matters in the end to Republican voters and by extension, America. It's simply a given in Bobo's world.



If there's such a thing as criminal lack of self-awareness, Brooks wins the title.

Republicans aren't normal, says David Brooks, who can't see just how deranged and dangerous they really are

By Michael J.W. Stickings

David Brooks is getting some credit for writing, in his July 4 column in the Times, that the GOP "may no longer be a normal party":

Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.

The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation's honor.

The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. Economists have identified many factors that contribute to economic growth, ranging from the productivity of the work force to the share of private savings that is available for private investment. Tax levels matter, but they are far from the only or even the most important factor.

But to members of this movement, tax levels are everything. Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation.

In other words, the GOP has been taken over by Grover Norquist and his anti-tax and essentially anti-government agenda. Rather than seek compromise, working with President Obama and the Democrats to achieve some sort of bipartisan deal on the debt ceiling and more generally on the budget, even a deal that actually gives them a lot of what they want (what with Obama playing the old-fashioned moderate Republican and Democrats unwilling (or unable) to stand firm, they dig themselves ever deeper into their extremist right-wing ideology.

Brooks is right about this.

But he is wrong -- and he writes this in the very first paragraph -- that "Republicans have changed American politics since they took control of the House of Representatives," "[putting] spending restraint and debt reduction at the top of the national agenda, "[sparking] a discussion on entitlement reform," and "[turning] a bill to raise the debt limit into an opportunity to put the U.S. on a stable fiscal course."

He's wrong on all three counts.

First, Republicans are only pretending to talk about fiscal restraint and debt reduction. They aren't serious about either, which is why they reject compromise. What they really want is to lower taxes, and specifically taxes on the wealthy, both individual and corporate. Wunderkind Paul Ryan, who has become, with the media's enabling/blessing, the voice of this supposed sanity, is actually little more than a a plutocratic libertarian, an Ayn Rand devotee who is all about tax cuts, and hence all about continued, and worsened, fiscal insanity.

Second, Republicans aren't serious about entitlement reform unless what that means is chopping entitlement programs into oblivion. Ryan isn't proposing Medicare reform, he's proposing the end of Medicare as we know it, the end of Medicare as the American people want it to be. Americans clearly reject Social Security privatization, another key item on the Republican agenda, and they reject Ryan's Medicare plan as well.

Third, Republicans aren't using the debt ceiling debate, such as there is one, to put the country on the path to fiscal stability, they're essentially holding the American economy hostage in order to get what they want. There is no debate about the debt ceiling. It must be raised. If not, we might just as well sit back and watch the apocalypse unfold. Much of the economy would collapse, as the country would no longer be able to pay off its debts. It would be incredibly irresponsible, but Republicans prefer to play political chicken. And they're not serious about fiscal stability, which requires bipartisan effort. We know this because they don't even want to be at the bargaining table.

So, yes, fine, Republicans aren't normal anymore. Most of us knew that a long, long time ago -- Brooks is hardly saying anything new. But Brooks himself refuses to see or just can't see Republicans for what they really are. They're not just abnormal, they're deranged and dangerous, descending deeper and deeper into madness. And they're trying to take America down with them.

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David Brooks and the possible backlash against the Tea Party GOP

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I really don't know why I bother with David Brooks -- he seems so rational, at least for a conservative, and yet gets so much wrong (he's not so much political analyst as political opiner who pushes ill-conceived theories) -- but, well, humour me just for this post.

In his NYT column today, Brooks argues that the liberal contention of a likely backlash from independents and moderates against an increasingly right-wing Republican Party is really just a myth -- it isn't happening and won't be happening this year:

There's only one problem with this theory. There is no evidence to support it. The Republican Party may be moving sharply right, but there is no data to suggest that this has hurt its electoral prospects, at least this year.

I asked the election guru Charlie Cook if there were signs that the Tea Party was scaring away the independents. "I haven't seen any," he replied. I asked another Hall of Fame pollster, Peter Hart, if there were Republican or independent voters so alarmed by the Tea Party that they might alter their votes. He ran the numbers and found very few potential defectors.

*****

Nor is there evidence that the Tea Party's success has changed moderates' perceptions about Republicans generally. According to a survey published in July by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Americans feel philosophically closer to the Republicans than to the Democrats. Put another way, many moderates see Democrats like Nancy Pelosi as more extreme than Republicans like John Boehner.

Nor is there any sign that alarm over the Tea Party is hurting individual Republican candidates.

Far be it from me to question the eternal wisdom of pollsters, and, to an extent, Brooks is right. The state of the economy is a far more pressing issue for Americans than the state of the GOP, and even if the state of the economy isn't the Democrats' fault, voters are likely to vent their fear and anger by voting against the party in power, namely, the Democrats. That's just the way it goes. And he's right that the full impact of the growing extremism of the GOP, including the Tea Party takeover of much of it, likely won't be felt in electoral terms until well after the November midterms:

But that damage is all in the future. Right now, the Tea Party doesn't matter. The Republicans don't matter. The economy and the Democrats are handing the G.O.P. a great, unearned revival. Nothing, it seems, is more scary than one-party Democratic control.

Unearned indeed, but great? We shall see.

The fact is, we jut don't know how much the Tea Party will matter and how exactly voters will respond to the growing extremism of the GOP. Of course, it's the economy, stupid, and Democrats will be unjustly punished, wrongly held accountable for a historic economic crisis that owes far more to Republican policy (under Bush, specifically, but begun much earlier) than to Democratic action since Obama won the White House. Indeed, if anything, Democratic action, such as the stimulus package and the bank bailout, made the crisis far less bad than it otherwise would have been -- not that voters appreciate this.

But the election season thus far has been dominated by the bases of the two parties, by those more committed voters who identify with one party or the other, are deeply partisan, and turn out to vote in primaries. The rest of the electorate, a large majority of it, just hasn't been paying much attention and is only now, I suspect, with summer over, beginning to think about the options before it. These are voters who may identify as Republican or Democratic but who are less politically engaged than the partisans or, if engaged, less committed to one or the other, voters who don't just vote the party line no matter what. Many of these are independents, and many are turned off by the partisan extremism they see in Washington. Yes, it may be true that some of them prefer Boehner to Pelosi, but if anything their preferences are yet to be fully formed. And when in the coming weeks they start paying attention, when they start thinking about the issues that matter to them and how they'll vote, I suspect they -- many of them -- will look upon the state of the Republican Party with disgust.

What will help is that Obama, a great campaigner, will be on the campaign trail stumping for Democrats and articulating as only he can the heart of the matter of November's midterms, defending his and the Democrats' record against Republican attacks and smears and pushing back against Republican politics and policy. And these voters, those who have yet to make up their mind, those who right now lack the enthusiasm to get out and try to make a difference, will be paying attention.

This is not to say that the Democrats are perfect. Far from it. But they have a solid record to run on even in a time of grave economic uncertainty and widespread popular fear and frustration: a stimulus package that stabilized the economy and put it on the road to recovery, health-care reform that will extend choice and coverage to millions while taking power away from the profit-driven insurance industry, Wall Street reform that will block counter relentless greed and hold insiders accountable, tax policy that focuses on relieving the burden on the middle class instead of benefitting the rich.

Right now, sure, there haven't been many "defectors." But this could very well change once the campaign really heats up. When voters look at the two parties and see that the Republican Party has effectively been taken over by the likes of Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, Joe Miller in Alaska, and Rand Paul in Kentucky, to name but four of the more widely-known extremists, many of them may very well run the other way.

The consequences for the GOP could indeed be more severe in 2012 and beyond, but it's awfully short-sighted of Brooks -- who to his credit sees that Tea Party conservatism is dominated by "a narcissistic sense of victimization, an egomaniacal belief in one's own rightness and purity, a willingness to distort the truth so that every conflict becomes a contest of pure good versus pure evil" -- not to see (or at least not to admit) that a good deal can happen between now and November.

Kvetch a falling star

By Mustang Bobby.

David Brooks contemplates the fall of General McChrystal:

General McChrystal was excellent at his job. He had outstanding relations with the White House and entirely proper relationships with his various civilian partners in the State Department and beyond. He set up a superb decision-making apparatus that deftly used military and civilian expertise.

But McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched. And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter. And this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority. He took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him.

The reticent ethos had its flaws. But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

So it's the fault of Michael Hastings, the reporter for Rolling Stone, who's to blame for General McChrystal granting him unfettered and unguarded access to him and his staff? It's the reporter's fault that these people suddenly became incredibly garrulous about their true feelings about their bosses and the bosses who boss them? Mr. Hastings must have some awesome powers of persuasion.

Or perhaps Gen. McChrystal and his staff exercised really poor judgment or never learned that most basic lesson you're taught when you get into a position of power: always assume the microphone is on and that what you say will be repeated in some way or another. It doesn't matter if the reporter is from Rolling Stone or Stars and Stripes.

And instead of being shocked and saddened by the vulture culture in Washington -- or anywhere powerful people gather -- Mr. Brooks ought to remember that it's called "reporting" for a reason.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Stagnation

By Mustang Bobby.

David Brooks is at it again, trying to convince us that it is fate that has brought us to this point where the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a symbol of the "nasty stasis" where trying to balance the free market and government regulation is beyond the control of any one president or corporation. He offers a lot of historical comparisons to the Iranian hostage crisis and tries to use the moderate tone that while everyone means well, sometimes things are just too much for us to handle and we must learn our humbling lesson.

Oh, crap. This passive-voice pablum about "the country’s core confusion about the role of government" is his way of backing away from the obvious conclusion that a generation's worth of hearing that "Big Guv'ment" is the problem and the free market is the Holy Grail of freedom and roses and rainbows for the whole world is bunk. If it hadn't been for a concerted effort on the part of the Republicans and their corporate allies to dismantle and defang any form of regulation of business since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, not to mention the complicity of Democrats who knew a good source of campaign funding when they saw it, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with, and if we were, there would be real-world consequences for those that caused them. It isn't "stagnation" when doing everything possible to do nothing -- vide the current GOP minority in Congress -- is your idea of how to run a government.

The supreme irony of all of this is that when the shit really hits the fan in Detroit and Wall Street or when the oil hits the shore in Louisiana, who do you think are the loudest complainers about the inefficiency of government and who are the ones standing there with their hands out demanding instant relief in the form of cash from the Feds to fix it? Yeah, the same people who were screaming about the Tenth Amendment, states' rights, secession, and complaining that oil-rig regulation stifles the free market and makes it tough for the "small business owners." Yeah, I think dead birds, stinky beaches, and no tourists makes it tough, too.

What is also the most maddening thing is that once this oil spill is contained -- whenever that is -- we will all firmly resolve to fix the problems that caused it and make sure that it never happens again. We will learn from our mistakes and go on, confident in the knowledge that we have covered every contingency, taken every precaution, sued everybody for the damages, and we can resume our lives again. Except whatever we learn from this and whatever regulations and laws we put in place will be so watered-down and loop-holed that those with the right kind of grease can slip through it until the next time. And there's always a next time.

We were supposed to learn from the Exxon Valdez and Hurricane Katrina and the Iranian hostage crisis and Vietnam and Watergate and Cuba and the Bay of Pigs and the Depression and Munich and any of the other hundreds of life-lessons of the past two centuries, and we rarely do. Or if we do, it's not the right lesson.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Oh, the humanity

By Mustang Bobby.

David Brooks gets all sentimental and weepy over the lack of comity in the Senate because the Democrats might use reconciliation to pass the healthcare bill.

Once partisan reconciliation is used for this bill, it will be used for everything, now and forever. The Senate will be the House. The remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out. We will live amid the relationships of group versus group, party versus party, inhumanity versus inhumanity.

We have a political culture in which the word “reconciliation” has come to mean “bitter division.” With increasing effectiveness, the system bleaches out normal behavior and the normal instincts of human sympathy.

I suppose it would be pointless to remind Mr. Brooks that President Bush's tax cuts passed in the Senate in 2003 through reconciliation and then only by the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Cheney. And then last month we were treated to the spectacle of Senators Jim Bunning and Richard Shelby, both Republicans, bringing the Senate to a screeching halt because of their personal vendettas. I don't seem to recall that he used those as examples as the end of civilized discourse as we know it.

Being lectured about the loss of civility in Congress by a Republican is like getting a lesson in table manners from an alligator.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Tea and loathing

By Mustang Bobby.

David Brooks rattles off all the reasons why the tea-baggers are the movement of the new decade -- their belief that "big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation" -- and that this is bad news for the Democrats and the Obama administration. This in spite of the fact that the aforementioned qualities are all hallmarks of every Republican administration since the end of World War II.

The Obama administration is premised on the conviction that pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country’s problems. Many Americans do not have faith in that sort of centralized expertise or in the political class generally.

Then, in typical Brooksian fashion, he comes up with a gross generalization that is supposed to sound like sage wisdom based on historical perspectives.

Moreover, the tea party movement has passion. Think back on the recent decades of American history — the way the hippies defined the 1960s; the feminists, the 1970s; the Christian conservatives, the 1980s. American history is often driven by passionate outsiders who force themselves into the center of American life.

If you accept the premise that those movements defined those decades, then you have to accept that they had the desired results that those movements were seeking. Yet the hippies of the 1960's resulted in the election of Richard Nixon, the feminists of the 1970's helped elect Ronald Reagan, and the Christian conservatives of the 1980's got us Bill Clinton. So if we follow Mr. Brooks' examples, the tea party movement of the 00's will backfire and leave us with the pragmatism of the Obama administration.

In the near term, the tea party tendency will dominate the Republican Party. It could be the ruin of the party, pulling it in an angry direction that suburban voters will not tolerate. But don’t underestimate the deep reservoirs of public disgust. If there is a double-dip recession, a long period of stagnation, a fiscal crisis, a terrorist attack or some other major scandal or event, the country could demand total change, creating a vacuum that only the tea party movement and its inheritors would be in a position to fill.

All of those problems were either caused or exacerbated by Republican leadership in both the White House and the Congress. Laying all of these at the feet of President Obama is a convenient way of of ginning up a rally, but it's not as if he made them all happen the minute he was inaugurated. To his credit, Mr. Obama has been candid about accepting the fact that he and his administration have to deal with them rather than blow sunshine up our asses with prating about "Morning in America." And it also tells you a great deal about the people who were responsible for making the mess in the first place; getting all twitterpated about why it's taking so long for someone else to clean up after them. The tea party movement has been largely created by corporate media interests and the GOP as a ratings booster and a distraction from the devastation that they caused --"Oh, look over there!" -- and used the primal instincts of fear and loathing of the "other" and the unknown to make it work. It's not that hard to do; there's always a willing audience for the conspiracy theories and the self-indulgent mantra of "what's in it for me."

Mr. Brooks is right; the tea-baggers will dominate the GOP and could make life very difficult for them, but he's whistling past the graveyard if he thinks it's just for the near term. After all, look what the hippies did for the Democrats in the late 1960's; to this day, the "dirty f***ing hippies" define the party to some, and the tea-baggers are notoriously proud of their fractious leadership and borderline racism. With any luck, will it take just as long for the GOP to shed the likes of the loons like Michele Bachmann and Dick Armey as it did for the Democrats to go from Abbie Hoffman to Barack Obama.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

If I were an independent, I'd want David Brooks to stop stereotyping me and claiming to speak for me

By Michael J.W. Stickings

On the surface, a lot of what David Brooks says and writes seems to make sense. And, to be fair, the whole cultural-social stereotyping thing that has propelled him to widespread punditocratic fame, perfected with the Patio Man and Realtor Mom of his exurban paradise, can be quite amusing.

Beneath the surface, though, when you get past the thin veneer of an amusing exterior, is, not to put too fine a word on it, bullshit. And the bullshit is on full display in Brooks's NYT column today, a typical fluff piece that makes grandiose statements based on limited, if non-existent, empirical evidence.

Specifically, Brooks asserts that the results of Tuesday's elections, as well as of recent public-opinion polls on a variety of major issues, show that independents, whom of course he treats as a monolith without any nuance or allowance for diversity whatsoever, have become more conservative. He concludes:

Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order, within which they can lead their lives. They can't always articulate what they want, but they withdraw from any party that threatens turmoil and risk. As always, they're looking for a safe pair of hands.

Uh-huh. Whatever.

First, Brooks doesn't seem to consider that shifts in public opinion, including for independents, do not happen in a vacuum. If independents are upset about too much government regulation, perhaps it's because economic uncertainty has them lashing out at those in power, specifically at Obama.

Second, independents could just be wrong. They're more conservative on global warming and immigration? I take that to mean they're a) stupider, given all the evidence against conservative denialism on global warming, and b) more xenophobic in a time of economic uncertainty, desperate to blame someone, anyone, especially a widely vilified Other, for their apparent demise.

One thing about independents is that they're not so much independent as they are self-absorbed egotists who want politicians to cater to their every whim and tend to be easily manipulated. Sorry, that's just the way it is. They're just not the self-aware, generally right-leaning ideal of Brooks's wacky imagination.

For more, see Noam Scheiber at The Stash. I agree that, in general, independents are "just pissed off about the economy." They may say there's too much government regulation and too much government interference in the market, but they don't have "well worked-out views about the proper size of government" and they aren't "supremely self-aware about where they stand on the ideological spectrum, and where politicians stand relative to them at any given moment." They're just not that sophisticated, and it's silly of Brooks, if typical of him, to attribute sense to them where there is, for the most part, just knee-jerk senselessness.

Uncivil war

By Mustang Bobby

Media Matters totes up the number of Republicans and moderate conservatives who are worried that the public might get the wrong idea about them because of the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh:

As Eric Boehlert pointed out earlier today, a significant fissure is opening up on the Right. The increasing influence of extremists like Fox News' Glenn Beck and radio host Rush Limbaugh has shaken more mainstream conservatives who are searching for a new set of leaders -- and the conservative establishment is lashing out. Consider some of the recent comments from prominent conservative media personalities and elected officials:

* Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks describing Beck, Limbaugh, and radio talker Mark Levin as "loons" who are "harmful for America."

* Former Bush and McCain adviser Mark McKinnon denouncing Levin's "jaw-dropping hate language about the president."

* MSNBC commentator and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough blasting Limbaugh's cheers after Chicago lost its Olympic bid: "Republicans have gone off the deep end"

These are just a few examples of a serious trend. Right-wing media figures are now routinely attacking each other's tactics and relevancy. On Friday, Brooks (nonsensically) dedicated an entire column to explaining why conservative media leaders like Beck and Limbaugh are not worthy of attention. He argued that we are once again witnessing "the story of media mavens who claim to represent a hidden majority but who in fact represent a mere niche -- even of the Republican Party." It's a point he made several weeks earlier, when he said that "[i]f the Republican Party is sane, they will say no to these people."

Much as I would like to agree, I think it's a little much to describe this as a "serious trend" for the conservatives; not that they're not over the top on their attacks on President Obama (and I'm still not buying Joe Scarborough's usual tactic of saying that the Democrats were just as bad to President Bush), but that this sort of distancing by the more grown-up members of the conservative community of their misbehaving miscreants is a sign of a fissure in the right wing. It's both a little tepid and a little late, and leaves the impression that they're doing it more out of a sense of obligation rather than a real sense of revulsion for some of the more hateful stuff that gets out there. Of course they're going to say that neither Mr. Beck nor Mr. Limbaugh speak for the party; that would affirm that they don't have anyone in the party that does. But they were all too happy to welcome Rush Limbaugh as an honorary Member of Congress when it suited them.

What I think is really going on here is typical CYA so that when either Glenn Beck goes completely off the deep end or some viewer of his takes up the notion that it is his God-given duty to do something evil to the first black man elected as president, they will be able to say "Hey, we warned you about this and we had nothing to do with it." It's not that they really care about how rotten and uncivil the discourse has gotten; they just don't want to get blamed for it when it leads to an inevitable and tragic climax.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Smartest Conservative of the Day: David Brooks (for being against conservative anti-Olympic fever)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

For saying this about Obama's efforts to bring the Olympics to Chicago on Meet the Press yesterday:

I have to say, I’m with Obama on this. He took a risk, he comes away somewhat humiliated, but he took a risk for his town, he took a risk for his country, he put his country ahead of his own personal prestige, and he lost one. I actually don't mind it. I think he was all right on this.

I object to Brooks's suggestion that Obama "comes away somewhat humiliated" -- he tried and the effort failed, but not necessarily because of him, and there is no humiliation in losing when the Olympics are concerned (more on this below) -- but, overall, I praise Brooks for coming out in opposition on this issue to so many of his fellow conservatives, including his former Weekly Standard colleagues Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes. (He even agreed, more or less, with fellow MTP panelist Rachel Maddow, who said this: "For them to be cheering America's loss here on the right, I think is sort of disgusting." Because, as she rightly pointed out, other world leaders, including Blair and Putin, have campaigned for the Olympics. This time, "all four finalists sent their head of government or head of state to make the argument.")

Kristol, on Fox News yesterday, accused Obama of bullying the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and he was "amused" by his failure, but of course Obama did no such thing. At The Weekly Standard, meanwhile, where he and Kristol are editors, Barnes pointed to "Obama's embarrassing failure in Copenhagen":

[W]hen an American president voluntarily takes up a fight and loses badly, it's a big deal. Obama could have stayed out. Having the summer Olympics in Chicago doesn't involve the national interest. But he thought the matter important enough to fly to Denmark and make the pitch for his hometown in person. He put his prestige on the line, only to be slapped down.

This is also ridiculous. Obama didn't lose badly. Chicago's bid lost out to Rio de Janeiro's. It would be one thing if Obama had gone to the U.N. and, say, been refused support on a key matter. In this case, he just did what so many other world leaders have done, and do, and only one city, only one big, can win at a time. Did the Chicago bid "involve the national interest"? Maybe not, strictly speaking, but what it against the national interest? No, not at all. There have been financial disasters in Olympic history, like Montreal '76 (my hometown, originally), but for the most part having the Olympics is a matter of national pride, an opportunity for the home city, and country, to showcase its best while the world is watching. (We Canadians are certainly excited about the upcoming Winter Games in Vancouver.) Besides, it's not always about financial gain -- though, in the long run, it may well be that having the Olympics is a fantastic investment in a city's, and country's, future.

Getting back to Barnes, it is simply not true that Obama was "slapped down." He supported Chicago's bid, but the vote in Copenhagen wasn't a referendum on Obama. Furthermore, given the IOC's reputation for, and long history of, corruption and insider politics, is there anything wrong with losing such a vote? As much as a city, as well as a country, may want the Olympics, the IOC has its own priorities, and winning has to do with trade-offs and quid pro quos among IOC members at least as much as it does with the actual merits of a bid. Toronto, for example, lost out on the 2008 Summer Games to Beijing. Was that an embarrassment for Toronto, a great loss for Canada. Were we "slapped down"? No. Beijing won because the IOC wanted the Games to be in China, a huge market. Forget that Toronto is an open, diverse, cosmopolitan city. Forget that China is a brutal totalitarian dictatorship. The IOC got what it wanted, and China got its reward. So it's a bit rich and rather disingenuous for these conservatives to be suggesting that an IOC vote is somehow a significant indicator of world opinion -- and that Chicago's loss was Obama's great embarrassment.

Steve Benen (quoting Paul Krugman) is right: "[A]s a political matter, in light of [the] right-wing ecstasy over Chicago not getting the Olympics, Paul Krugman concluded, 'Middle-aged adolescents -- dumb middle-aged adolescents -- rule one of our nation's two great political parties.' Sad, but true."

If there's anything embarrassing, and utterly repellent, it's the right-wing "glee," as Benen put it, over America's failure to win the 2016 Summer Games. Clearly, among conservatives, with one or two exceptions, party and ideology come before country. And they dare call themselves patriots?

Becklash

By Mustang Bobby.

David Brooks laments that Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are getting all the attention as the voices of the conservatives.

The Republican Party is unpopular because it’s more interested in pleasing Rush’s ghosts than actual people. The party is leaderless right now because nobody has the guts to step outside the rigid parameters enforced by the radio jocks and create a new party identity. The party is losing because it has adopted a radio entertainer’s niche-building strategy, while abandoning the politician’s coalition-building strategy.

The rise of Beck, Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and the rest has correlated almost perfectly with the decline of the G.O.P. But it’s not because the talk jocks have real power. It’s because they have illusory power, because Republicans hear the media mythology and fall for it every time.

As fond of history that Mr. Brooks is, I'm a bit surprised that he traces the death grip of talk jocks on the Republicans only back to the beginning of the last election cycle. It goes a lot further back than that; the recent cycle is only the latest example of fools rushing in to fill the leadership void on the right, going back to the end of the Reagan administration and their desperate search for someone as dominating, uniting, and mythical as Mr. Reagan was. Like him or not, he was the last real leader from the Right, and everyone who has tried to take the role -- Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, just to name a few -- has either fallen short or ended up doing more harm than good to their cause. But it's hard to replace a legend. (By the way, the Democrats haven't been immune to this, either; they spent a lot of losing election cycles searching for the next FDR or JFK.)

The problem for the Republicans and the conservatives is that they have cultivated and encouraged these kinds of stark gloom-and-doom oh-god-we're-all-gonna-die prophets, and their political philosophy has played into it: they are so convinced of their bumper-sticker ("Abortion Is Murder", "Where's the Birth Certificate?", "God Created Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve") rightness that anyone who doubts them is suspected of treason or insanity. The liberals have their own hard-core, but they have never had as much power over their side; progressives are much more prone to compromise (or caving) than conservatives. Thus we have Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the radio 24/7, while the Left has a rumpled Michael Moore coming along every three years with a documentary. (This has historical antecedents; in the 1930's the right wing had Father Coughlin while the left countered with Upton Sinclair. Guess who got more attention.) It isn't the message so much as it is the delivery. As Matthew Yglesias points out, the reason Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) got so much attention for his "Die Quickly!" speech on the floor of the House was because he stole the Republicans' playbook.

Just because someone like Rush Limbaugh is capable of making a lot of noise doesn't mean he can make a difference or sway the electorate. If you are going to turn politics into entertainment, you have to understand that show business may obsess about ratings and box office take, but you should never mistake them as affirming for intellect or art. Hollywood makes blockbusters like Transformers so that they can also make Julie & Julia, but they don't confuse the one with the other. (Were that not the case, Police Academy would have walked away with thirteen Oscars and Schindler's List would never have been made.) It's a lesson that seems to be lost on the conservatives. Steven F. Hayward, author of The Age of Reagan, worries that the intellectuals have left the party, leaving the birthers in charge and Glenn Beck in place of William F. Buckley.

Okay, so Beck may lack Buckley's urbanity, and his show will never be confused with "Firing Line." But he's on to something with his interest in serious analysis of liberalism's patrimony. The left is enraged with Beck's scandal-mongering over Van Jones and ACORN, but they have no idea that he poses a much bigger threat than that. If more conservative talkers took up the theme of challenging liberalism's bedrock assumptions the way Beck does from time to time, liberals would have to defend their problematic premises more often.

As long as Glenn Beck continues to misspell words like "oligarchy" and holds up a tin of snuff to make a point about the president promoting the Chicago Olympics, I don't think the liberals have a lot to worry about in terms of defending their premises, problematic or not. That's too bad; ideas and intellect flourish in a challenging environment. But as the saying goes, it's useless to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

William Safire (1929-2009)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

William Safire -- Nixon speechwriter, New York Times columnist, and conservative intellectual -- has died at the age of 79.

I'll admit, I never much cared for him -- or, rather, for his work:

Unlike most Washington columnists who offer judgments with Olympian detachment, Mr. Safire was a pugnacious contrarian who did much of his own reporting, called people liars in print and laced his opinions with outrageous wordplay.

Critics initially dismissed him as an apologist for the disgraced Nixon coterie. But he won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, and for 32 years tenaciously attacked and defended foreign and domestic policies, and the foibles, of seven administrations. Along the way, he incurred enmity and admiration, and made a lot of powerful people squirm.

Well, fair enough, he certainly was more of a "contrarian" than most on the right, and he was certainly, at times, admirably independent in his thinking, and he did, I suppose, make some "powerful people squirm." But he was also, to the end, a Nixon apologist and, even with the GOP lurching ever further rightward, a dedicated partisan. Sure, he was more pleasant, less insane, and far more intelligent than the Glenn Becks and Sean Hannitys of the world, and that made him appealing both in print and on Meet the Press -- he was sort of like David Brooks, a conservative liberals could actually respect and occasionally agree with -- but his apparent reasonableness, and his broad appeal, only made him, in a way, more nefarious. However independent, however flexible, he was an ideologue, and, in a way, an effective propagandist for conservatism, if more Nixonian than the extremism of the movement today, a Republican even when the Republican Party should no longer have appealed to him. I think the same of Brooks and the same of George Will, another old-style conservative in the heart of the liberal media establishment, or what used to be, though Brooks remains a neocon and Will remains more of an ideologue than Safire ever was. Both have Safire's appeal, but, as with Safire, it would be wise not to let appearances get in the way of better judgement.

Still, Safire was always a good read, always provocative, and, more often than not, a valuable contributor to the public debate. Conservatives would have done well to have taken him more seriously, and the rest of us, I think, should have done the same. Even to those of us who generally disagreed with him on pretty much everything, he offered a great deal, often irritatingly so, and we knew, or at least I can say that I did, that he was often a deeply perceptive thinker who at the very least compelled us to reconsider our assumptions and opinions, and even our firmly held beliefs, and, I think, we were all stronger for it in the end. Political preferences aside, isn't that what you want in a columnist at a major newspaper like the Times? Safire frequently went too far, and I can't say that everything he said and wrote fit this noble purpose, far from it from my limited perspective, but at least he wasn't one of those pundits who only tell a narrow fringe what it wants to hear and who lash out at everything else. We all know there are far too many such pundits today.

And, of course, he was, most admirably, a linguist, a defender of the English language at a time when it was, and is, being torn apart. I learned not to split infinitives from my father, and I don't, but Safire taught us all, in his own distinctive way, to use language properly, to speak and write according to rules that ought to remain in force, and to stand firm against the dumbing down of society through the erosion of linguistic standards.

To boldly go? No, never. William Safire will be missed.

What racism?

By Mustang Bobby

David Brooks just happened to jog through the tea party in Washington last weekend and saw that there wasn't a race riot going on where teabaggers and attendees at the Black Family Reunion Celebration happened to converge:

Because sociology is more important than fitness, I stopped to watch the interaction. These two groups were from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum. They’d both been energized by eloquent speakers. Yet I couldn’t discern any tension between them. It was just different groups of people milling about like at any park or sports arena.

And yet we live in a nation in which some people see every conflict through the prism of race. So over the past few days, many people, from Jimmy Carter on down, have argued that the hostility to President Obama is driven by racism. Some have argued that tea party slogans like “I Want My Country Back” are code words for white supremacy. Others say incivility on Capitol Hill is magnified by Obama’s dark skin.

Well, I don’t have a machine for peering into the souls of Obama’s critics, so I can’t measure how much racism is in there. But my impression is that race is largely beside the point. There are other, equally important strains in American history that are far more germane to the current conflicts.

Therefore he's sure that there is no racism involved in any of the anti-Obama demonstrations or outpouring of sentiment on cable TV or talk radio. Well, I'm glad he cleared that up. Now he can jog on with a clear conscience that white entitlement and patriarchy have nothing to do with it.

It is just as foolish for Mr. Brooks to dismiss links to racism behind the demonstrations and anger as it is to see racism behind every sign. But to say that it doesn't exist and hasn't played a role in some of the over-the-top attacks recently is an attempt to prove a negative. What's especially ironic is that Mr. Brooks doesn't help himself by saying that historically, populist protests are by nature "ill-mannered [...] whether they were led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin or anybody else." Yeah, citing a noted anti-Semite like Father Coughlin doesn't really help. And neither does the problematic assumption that all the people at the Black Family Reunion are supporters of President Obama just because they're African-American.

For someone who shows as much an interest in history as he does, hearing Mr. Brooks pronounce that "It's not about race" is to ignore the four hundred years of history of race relations in this country (especially since Mr. Brooks was jogging through a city that was once as segregated as any Alabama bus depot in 1955), and to find an equivalency between these protests and those that we saw during the Bush administration is fatuous. There are extremists on both sides of the aisle, but try as he might, Mr. Brooks cannot cite any case where a Democratic member stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and called into question Mr. Bush's birth certificate, or any governor of a state that raised the prospect of secession because they objected to the implementation of Medicare Part D or the warrantless wiretapping of citizens of their state.

And the knee-jerk reaction against those who suggest that there is a racist element in some of the attacks -- Obama as a witch doctor or "Barack the Magic Negro" come to mind -- tells me that those folks are awfully quick deny it without even examining what was said and who said it. Anybody who took an introductory class in psychology -- or proctored a middle school study hall -- knows a guilty conscience when they see it.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Summer rerun

By Mustang Bobby

David Brooks hauls out his semi-regular argument that "the liberals" are over-reaching.

It’s not that interesting to watch the Democrats lose touch with America. That’s because the plotline is exactly the same. The party is led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts, who neither understand nor sympathize with moderates. They have their own cherry-picking pollsters, their own media and activist cocoon, their own plans to lavishly spend borrowed money to buy votes.

I guess since he thought this line worked in 1993 and 2007, he'd use it again. This time he uses a recent Washington Post/ABC poll to support his claim that "Most Americans love Barack Obama personally, but support for Democratic policies is already sliding fast. Approval of Obama’s handling of health care, for example, has slid from 57 percent to 49 percent since April." But as Steve Benen points out, perhaps that's because "some" Americans (to use one of Mr. Brooks' more common adjectives) aren't happy that the president's health care reforms don't go far enough or that he's still making noises about being bipartisan on the formulation of the policy. Some of us are saying, "Hey, you won the election and the Republicans are at their lowest point since Barry Goldwater corkscrewed into the desert in 1964. Act like it."

Mr. Brooks then hauls out his tut-tutting over the deficit and budget-busting. "Instead of allaying moderate anxieties about the deficits, the budget is expected to increase the government debt by $11 trillion between 2009 and 2019." I'm not sure where he gets his numbers -- he doesn't cite any facts to back up this claim -- and yet all of a sudden he's joining the amen chorus of Republicans who have suddenly discovered that, contrary to what Dick Cheney once said, deficits do matter. There's no sinner like a reformed saint.

Finally, he gets around to Obama's real problem: he's not feared by the Democrats on the Hill and therefor they think they can roll him. He cites Machiavelli; "a leader should be feared as well as loved." I guess it must be a mystery to Mr. Brooks and the rest of the Republicans how a president can get his agenda through Congress and make his case to the American people without scaring the crap out of them. Mr. Brooks seems to have forgotten that the most worshiped president the Republicans ever had in modern memory, Ronald Reagan, didn't get his agenda passed by instilling fear in people, and neither did the icon of the Democrats, Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, the legacies of the presidents who did get their way on the Hill by using fear -- Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon -- speak for themselves. Fear turns to defiance when those who are being cowed perceive that their tormentor has been weakened, and both LBJ and Nixon lost support among their own party when they needed it the most.

Actually, the fear factor has been chugging right along, but not in the way that Mr. Brooks envisions. The right wing nutsery has tried to stoke opposition to President Obama by screaming about socialism and imminent dictatorship; cultivating the culture of whiny white male Christianist victimhood to a high art; creating a cottage industry of bug-eyed paranoids like Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck; and conversely accusing him of being weak-willed and cowardly. Perhaps it's a gauge of right-wing discombobulation that they can't even get their invective messages straight. All that has done is provide us with a rich trove of oddball entertainment ranging from Sarah Palin's dithery dead-fish metaphors to the beetle-browed death threats of G. Gordon Liddy and the blatant racism of Pat Buchanan. In a way, that's helped the president; it's easy to pass legislation when your opposition does nothing more than foam at the mouth.

Mr. Brooks closes with one of his patented aphorisms: "Every new majority overinterprets its mandate. We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again." Look, I realize we're in the middle of the lazy hazy crazy days of summer, but could he at least try to come up with something both a little more original and is at least within the ballpark of reality?

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

A tale of love, loneliness, and David Brooks's inner thigh

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Okay, so David Brooks -- you know, the big-shot NYT columnist -- was on MSNBC with Norah O'Donnell and John Harwood earlier today. They were talking about "the dignity code" in Washington, which in a column earlier in the week Brooks wrote has been "completely obliterated," and, among other things, he said this:

You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don't know about you guys, but in my view, they're all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They're guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.

Yeah... what the fuck, right?

Harwood was taken aback and O'Donnell asked who it was. To which Brooks replied:

I'm not telling you, I'm not telling you. But so, a lot of them spend so much time needing people's love and yet they are shooting upwards their whole life, they're not that great in normal human relationships. And so, they're like freaks, they don't know how to, they're lonely. They reach out.

Apparently, they reach out for David Brooks's inner thigh.

Brooks went on to bring up "sloppy women who are licking their aides" -- women in Congress, that is, but he couldn't think of any examples.

His remarks were so bizarre that O'Donnell asked if he'd had "a couple drinks at lunch." "No,: replied, Brooks, he was just "trying not to be too dignified and stuffy."

Okay, but he just revealed publicly that a Republican senator... what? Made a pass at him? Tried to get fresh with him? Hit on him? Near-molested him?

One suspects that this senator doesn't much care for homosexuals and is moralistically anti-gay -- Republicans are like that, after all. And yet he still, uh, warmed up to Brooks. Or was he just being... friendly?

I don't know many men (straight or gay, but certainly not the former) who get friendly by becoming acquainted with another man's inner thigh. Actually, such, uh, familiarity is hardly accepted at all in polite society.

Brooks apparently found the experience uncomforable, and who wouldn't? But imagine a man doing this to a woman. What is harrassment and what isn't? Being a freak, or being lonely, is hardly an acceptable excuse.

Watch the exchange below. It's not something you hear every day. It makes you wonder not just about what's going on up on Capitol Hill but about what's bouncing around in David Brooks's head. (He didn't make it up, did he? No, surely not. But, then, is this sort of thing common?)

Retro Garlic: A doozy ... David Brooks gets creepier

By J. Thomas Duffy

Oh man, this could only have happened on a Friday.

If the Sanford, Ensign, Palin, and Jackson circuses weren't enough for you, than enter, stage right, David Brooks, Rightwing Freak Show columnist for the NYT, seemingly (more on this below), with a bit of a buzz on, being interviewed on cable news.

David Brooks says a Republican senator groped his thigh at a dinner party



Whoa!

A Republican Senator with his hand on David Brooks' inner thigh?

Now, with that specific identification, one name that jumps out first is Larry Craig.

I mean, you can put together little, milquetoast, Wally Cox-like Brooks, either being intimidated, or, perhaps, excited, by big, burly, Larry "Wide-Stance" Craig feeling him up, maybe fantasizing hearing (later, of course) "You bad boy ... You naughty, boy ... You nasty, bad, naughty boy."

John Cole, at Balloon Juice, is hoping that it is "John Kyl or John Cornyn," while Libby Spencer, at her The Impolitic, is having a hard time containing herself -- "It would be irresponsible not to speculate."



And doesn't Brooks seem a bit too giddy?

Even host Nora O'Donnell sensed something amiss:

O’DONNELL: Can I ask one other question David? Do you think, what about female or women politicians? Are they dignified and are there examples of when they have not? Or does it tend to be the men who less dignified?

BROOKS: Yeah, I think that’s mostly a matter of genetics. I do think that…I do think there’s loneliness.

O’DONNELL: That was just a softball, David, and you really hit it very well.

BROOKS: Yeah, I wish I could think of sort of St. Bernards, sloppy women who are licking their aides, but but no, I can’t think of any.

HARWOOD: I’m not going there.

O’DONNELL: Did you have a couple drinks at lunch, David? I mean, this is clearly.

BROOKS: No, you’ve hit me…I’m trying not to be too dignified and stuffy.

Brooks not trying to be "dignified and stuffy" is like Bernie Madoff not trying to hustle clients -- doesn't happen!

And, as you will see, there may be much more to this, as The Garlic had the name "David Brooks" and "creepy" tied together some time ago.

The Retro Part

PBS's Lehrer Admits Brooks "Body Language" Skills "Creeps Me Out" ... Reveals Uncomfortable With Columnist "Staring At Me" On-Set; Alludes "Toe-Tapping" Also Involved

Hmmm ...

Fascination with "body language" ... Another man's hand on his inner thigh ...

I don't know ...

Pretty creepy, there, David Brooks ...



(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)

Charm offensive: Obama at dinner with the conservative punditocracy

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I've been meaning all day to comment on Obama's dinner with Will, Kristol, Brooks, and Krauthammer -- the four horsemen of the right-wing apocalypse? -- but I just don't have much to say about it. On Obama's part, it was an exceptionally smart move. Why not, as the soon-to-be president, make nice and break bread with four leading conservative political commentators? If nothing else, as Michael Crowley stressed, "Obama will surely choose his words carefully and avoid saying anything that causes him trouble. He's certainly not going to make any new promises to appease the right. And a little personal charm" -- or a charm offensive? -- "is sure to buy him a few pulled punches among the columns and punditry of these men." No, they won't go soft, but maybe at least they'll show him some respect and take him, and his efforts at outreach to the right, seriously. (Remember that the Clintons did themselves no favours by attacking the media, including liberals, early on, setting a negative tone that only hindered the Clinton presidency. Obama may be stuffing his administration with Clintonites, but he has certainly learned from some of Clinton's mistakes.)

And liberals, by the way, aren't all that troubled by the dinner. Take Steve Benen and Kevin Drum, for example. And, again, I feel much the same way.

As Jon Chait argues, though, and I think he's right about this, conservatives wouldn't be nearly as understanding if the situation were reversed:

I actually don't find it terribly surprising that liberals haven't shown any outrage over Barack Obama's dinner party with George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, and David Brooks. I'll get to my hypothesis why liberals aren't upset in a moment. But first imagine this counterfactual: George W. Bush (or maybe a victorious John McCain) sat down before his first inauguration with Paul Krugman, E.J. Dionne, and Frank Foer. Would conservatives have reacted with the same equanimity? No, I think they'd have gone nuts. And the reason is that they wouldn't have confidence in Bush or McCain to be surrounded by liberal ideas without being deeply influenced by them. I don't think they'd have reacted this way if, say, a President Mitt Romney did the same thing.

And that's why liberals aren't having a cow. They know that Obama understands far more about policy than any of his right-wing dinner companions, is used to being exposed to opposing ideas, and won't come out of that dinner telling his staff, "Hey, did you know we cut half the capital gains tax and raise more revenue?"

A separate issue is why Obama didn't pick some conservatives with a bit more intellectual integrity than, say, Kristol and Krauthammer. The problem, of course, is conservatives like that tend not to rise to positions of high influence.

Right, I don't think there's any concern, despite existing (and, in my view, wrong-headed) concerns among some progressives that he's a centrist of sorts, that Obama will surrender to conservative pressure or otherwise reveal himself to be a Republican. If nothing else, we have confidence in Obama's firmness. And we understand, I think, that it makes good political sense, at this time, with the economic stimulus package soon to be up for a vote and with health care, energy, and education reform looming on the horizon, to reach out not just to potentially friendly Republicans in Congress but to key figures, key opinion-shapers, on the right. Which is why he picked these four. Two of them, I agree, may not have much intellectual integrity -- I'd say Will is the only one with much of it, and Brooks has more than Krauthammer and far, far more than Kristol -- but there's no denying their lofty places in the conservative food chain. (But at least more despicable figures like Limbaugh and O'Reilly weren't there. That would have been too much even for generous and understanding liberals to take.)

This is one case where it is best to trust that Obama knows what he's doing. I have no doubt that he does.

What's at stake

By Mustang Bobby

David Brooks is worried that Barack Obama is overconfident about his financial stimulus package:

This will be the most complex piece of legislation in American history, and as if the policy content wasn’t complicated enough, Obama also promised to pass it via Immaculate Conception — through a new legislative process that will transform politics. The process, he said, will be totally transparent. There will be no earmarks, no special-interest pleading. In a direct rebuttal to Federalist No. 10, he called on lawmakers to put aside their parochial concerns and pass the measure in weeks.

And as if that isn’t enough, he promised next month to make repairing Social Security and Medicare a “central part” of his budget. “I’m not out to increase the size of government long-term,” he told John Harwood of The Times.

This is daring and impressive stuff. Obama’s team has clearly thought through every piece of this plan. There’s no plank that’s obviously wasteful or that reeks of special-interest pleading. The tax cut is big and bipartisan. Obama is properly worried about runaway deficits, but he’s spending money on things one would want to do anyway. This is not an attempt to use the crisis to build a European-style welfare state.

[...]

Maybe Obama can pull this off, but I have my worries. By this time next year, he’ll either be a great president or a broken one.

Mr. Brooks is worried that the Obama stimulus plan is being put together in a hurry. But unlike some people, Mr. Obama's team has been aware of the financial crisis for a while longer than four months, and there is more substance to Mr. Obama's plans than the smoke, mirrors, and balloon animals that the Bush administration cobbled together in their hurried and messy response to the collapse of Wall Street in September; remember Treasury Secretary Paulson's three-page memo granting him absolute power?

If Mr. Obama's campaign for the presidency and his deft handling of the transition so far are any guide, it appears that when it comes to planning ahead, Mr. Obama has got this. His confidence, which seems to be unsettling to Mr. Brooks, is sure enough that he is willing to work with Republicans and recalcitrant Democrats to accomplish his goal without worrying about his ego or his legacy. I know this may come as a shock to Mr. Brooks, but unlike some of his predecessors, including his immediate one, but Mr. Obama isn't in this to establish his legacy. (In the first place, his legacy is already been set by his election.)

Like a lot of conservatives, Mr. Brooks is confusing self-confidence with bravado. I know this might be a new concept to some people, especially those on the right who have this annoying habit of turning everything into a cult of personality, but whether or not Mr. Obama is a great president or a broken one a year from now doesn't really fit into the equation, because if the economy isn't on the road to recovery a year from now, it won't matter: there won't be much of a country left to be president of.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Brooks: Don't know much about education

By Mustang Bobby

David Brooks has an uncanny way of taking a complex issue and boiling it down to an either/or situation. That may be what they teach in Punditry 101, but when he's writing about public education and who Barack Obama should choose for the Secretary of Education, it's a lesson that is a waste of time.

As in many other areas, the biggest education debates are happening within the Democratic Party. On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards. On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms.

If it were that simple, then the problems would have been solved years ago and we wouldn't be having this conversation. However, what he thinks he can cram into his column and the choices he offers are superficial at best and don't even begin to scratch the surface.

Take, for example, the issue of merit pay. It makes sense on the surface; after all, good sales people are rewarded with bonuses for doing a good job, as is anyone who gets a tip, like a waiter or a cab driver. But doing it for teachers has a lot of factors that go into determining whether or not they're a "good teacher." What is the standard for judging them? High test scores on standardized tests? What does that prove other than the teacher is good at getting students to learn things by rote? That's not teaching, it's drilling, and if the students have no idea what and why they're learning, they're no better than where they were before. Second, teachers don't teach in a vacuum; there's the support mechanism of the school itself and the staff as well as the parents and the central administration. Why is merit pay only going to the teacher when everyone else -- including the students -- had a hand in the education process? (On the other hand, students can submarine a good teacher for no other reason than they're ornery kids and would like nothing better than to take out a teacher they don't happen to like that week. I've seen that happen more than once.)

Mr. Brooks tosses in the teachers' unions as if they are still a powerful force in dictating to the local school boards and have the ability to hold them hostage to their outrageous demands for decent salaries and working conditions for teachers and support staff. I'm sure there are a lot of teachers in the public schools -- especially here in Florida -- who wish that it was true. Teachers here are forbidden by law from striking, so what clout do they have other than making their case? Teachers are not required to be union members to do their job, so the cudgel that Mr. Brooks and many conservatives think the NEA holds over public education is more like a Whiffle bat. And yet the unions do serve a purpose, which is to remind the public that teachers don't "have it easy," with summers off and done with work at 2:30. Would that that was true. First, most teachers don't get paid for the summer, or if they do, it's pro-rated over the ten months, and I have yet to meet a good teacher who didn't put in 12 hours a day during the school year whether it's in the classroom, at home grading papers and writing lesson plans, attending after-school events, meeting parents, and generally keeping the peace in a sea of hyperactivity that would exhaust anyone in an hour. And all of it for a starting salary, even with advanced degrees, that would be the same as a file clerk in a small business.

I've been around education all my life. I've taught at levels from middle school to college, and now that I work in education administration, I can tell just by being around someone whether or not they have spent any time in the classroom. Mr. Brooks clearly has never spent a day in the trenches, and I challenge him to spend a week at the public school of his choice, be it the finest one in the country or the most decrepit in the poorest city in the country. He will learn two things very quickly: first, it doesn't really matter who the Secretary of Education is because all education is local, and second, the dedication of the teachers who come to school early and stay late is the same fiery passion for the job whether you're at New Trier in Winnetka, Illinois or Liberty City in Miami. We work for the kids. So knock off the unfunded mandates like No Child Left Behind and the useless boondoggles, give us the tools (and the proper environment), and let us do our job.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)