Wednesday, August 09, 2006

News Flash -- David Brooks Still Clueless

One of the bad parts about paying for TimesSelect is that you get access to David Brooks's OpEd pieces. Well, there isn't an a la carte option, and besides, I was raised Catholic, so I'm always up for a little mortification.

Oh, that's not really it. The truth is that I am on a never-ending quest to hear something, anything, from the right that might actually sound different from the latest edition of Karl Rove's talking points. It's a futile quest, I suppose, because every time I find someone who I think might qualify, it turns out that the right has just revoked his or her conservative credentials.

I often wonder why the NY Times can't find someone more coherent than David Brooks to represent the right. (It's sure not John Tierney. Everyone knows that.) I miss William Safire -- I rarely agreed with him, but at least he made me think.

Anyway, Brooks's 8/10 piece is bad even by his standards. He has decided that despite the 1,047,876,923,912,375 Lieberman/Lamont analysis pieces already posted on the Web, he should weigh in with his own bad craziness musings.

He starts off sounding like he's proposing a middle-ground type of thinking, saying that "the McCain-Lieberman Party" is the new third party in the US.

Okay, a plea for moderation is . . . understandable, I guess is the charitable way of putting it. But this is a ludicrous example of a "third way." These two guys have spent the past five years kowtowing to W. How is that not 100% Republican?

Brooks's plea is also more than a little bit stupid. McCain is doing what he has to do to stay in the Republican Party's good graces -- witness the recent sucking up to Falwell. Lieberman, by contrast, has flat-out abandoned the Democrats.

Brooks throws the typical right-winger hate card right away: "Ned Lamont on a victory platform with ... Al Sharpton smiling just behind."

Ooooh, Al Sharpton was on stage with Ned Lamont. Hey, Dave? Rev. Al may be a bit of a loose cannon, but he's really not coming to kill your puppy.

Here's another classic: "Lamont's voters are rich ..."

It never fails to amaze me that the party of the fat cats continues to say this with a straight face.*

And then there's the technique of juxtaposition: "... the continuing jihad, Speaker Pelosi, a possible economic slowdown ..."

I'm sure he'll protest tomorrow that he never meant to say the House minority leader is a jihadist. Nooooooo.

Brooks calls the people of Connecticut who voted against Lieberman, and the people of the United States who supported this effort, "net-root DeLays," straining to compare a righteously dissatisfied electorate with the Republicans' erstwhile hero. And my, my, how they do turn on their own.

He calls the pushback of a people fed up with the disasters caused by six years of Republican hegemony a "Sunni-Shiite style of politics."

Look, Dave, I know that revisionist history is a favorite parlor game of the right, but let's not forget the launch of the right wing hate machine back in the Clinton Administration. We on the left have been laughed at, forever, for trying to be accomodating. We finally see it won't work with this bunch. We've been backed into a corner, and suddenly we're the extremists?

He characterizes people like me and my friends as "ideologues on the left, perpetually two years behind the national mood ..."

Last question, Dave: What were W's poll numbers two years ago, and what are they now?

Two possible conclusions: Either three-fifths of the country has suddenly become flamingly liberal, or someone's time machine is on the fritz. As much as I'd like to believe the former, I'm a card-carrying member of the reality-based community. Unlike Dave, evidently.

Brooks concludes: "... highly educated secular liberals are pulling the Democrats upscale and to the left."

I conclude: Like that's a bad thing?


* And, as usual, it's not particularly true. Mickey Kaus, no lover of the left, cites a CBS/NYT exit poll [pdf]: "Lamont got 48% of those making less than $50K, 52% of those making more than $100K, and 53% of those in between."

[Update 2006-08-10 08:45 EDT]: Above footnote added

[Update 2006-08-10 10:10 EDT]: Jonathan Chait piles on, too

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I mostly agree with your comments, but find a few nits to pick on a couple of items. McCain didn't kowtow to W on the issue of torturing prisoners, in fact, he forced him and Cheney to retreat. One issue doesn't make a case, of course, and I'm not a fan of McCain but he did push against pork fairly well. It's generally not politic to contest everything with the head of your party.

Brooks comment about Lamont on the platform with Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters etc may not be something that bothers you as a liberal, but as an anti-war liberal trying to bring anti-war moderate republicans to vote for you because they oppose the war making that association with the far left loose canons (your words) may not be the best tactic to unify the anti-war voters. You, as a moderate republican, might like to vote against the war with Lamont, but hesitate to throw in with Jackson, Sharpton, and Waters. Those three personify puppy eaters to the right wing.

I didn't see the article but I take it from your comments, that Brooks is arguing for a moderate middle. Rather than a polarization of the left and right -- in that sense a Sunni/Shiite style of politics with no compromise in the middle. It doesn't sound that unreasonable to me.

As far as 48% of the voters making 50K and 53% of the voters making between 50K and 100K and 52% of voters making over 100K. By my standards those are all "rich" voters as Brooks says. What percentage of voters making less than 20K voted for Lamont? By including everyone making under 50K, Kaus extends the "poor" category so high that you really can't say that it proves anything about the common man. Out here at least teachers and their equivalents, for example, don't make 50K. Notice also that in that 50K group less than half voted for Lamont -- and they may have been those making 25K to 50K rather than those making less than 25K. At best Micky Kaus' numbers against Brooks' observation is a shaky proof.

As far as Brooks being a spokesman for conservatives, I don't think of him being very conservative. To me he seems like kind of a moderate with some right leanings. Safire on the other hand was a Nixon conservative and would tend to take more extreme positions. Or at least more traditional conservative positions, i.e., small govt, fiscal responsibility, hardline anti-communist positons, and those stuffy phrases such as "Nattering nabobs of negativism" which as I recall was credited to him for writing the speech for Spiro Agnew in which it appeared. Nattering nabobs? ... Well, it's colorful, but pretty pretentious.

Although I grant it's less entertaining, personally I don't have any problem with a columnist trying to tone down the rhetoric a little bit and take a more moderate line. If one is writing a daily or weekly column one has to come up with some topic that in the news every week. Adding your voice to the chorus doesn't seem to me to be piling it on, when as you point out, several Brazilian pieces have already been written about it. Cheeses you've got to get a column out this week, so you can't fault a guy too much for doing a piece on it even though the bloggers have hammered it to death. The non-bloogers may have seen an article or two about it (but maybe not -- I don't recall that I've seen one in the newspapers), but only you highly political readers in the blogosphere have been innundated with it. If you're writing a >newspaper< column in print, you have to assume that not many people have seen anything about it as you go to press.

None of my friends seems to know or care much about the Lamont/Lieberman election. Where is Connecticutt anyway? Isn't it some tiny little state way back East somewhere that has very few electoral votes?

That's the best defense of Brooks I can come up with. I hope he appreciates it. LOL

bjkeefe said...

TC --

Thanks for your comments. I agree that I probably went a little hyperbolic in my post. Brooks probably was, in the end, arguing for moderation, and I may have given him less credit than he deserved. I have sent you the column so you can judge for yourself.

Having acknowledged, I now repick the nits.

McCain, it seems to me, has gone awfully quite in the past few months in criticizing the Bush Administration and its policies. I agree that his was a voice of sanity on the torture issue, but I don't hear much about that anymore. Nor do I hear much from him on illegal wiretapping or the war in Iraq. It's possible that he is, in fact, talking as much as ever, and that the media filter has changed. But from what I can see, his recent low profile seems to accord completely with his recent sucking up to the radical Christianists. The backing off from his frequent, highly public critiques of W count to me as kowtowing. There was a time when McCain seemed to me to be a pretty good guy, but as I noted a couple of months ago, I don't view him as charitably anymore.

I agree with you that Sharpton, et al, are viewed less favorably by the right than by me. First, that's their bad. Second, Lamont's decision to feature them onstage can probably be viewed as a pragmatic political choice: Any rich white guy is going to need lots of help in appealing to black voters. Third, the Democratic Party needs to be more truly responsive to black concerns (as do the Republicans, but that's probably wishing for the moon), and I'd like to think that Lamont's featuring prominent black leaders on stage is an in-your-face statement of intent, and not just a photo-op.

I think that Lamont's having made an anti-war stance a central theme of his campaign was bound to get him automatically labeled "far left" by the right wing spin machine, independent of any of particular spotlighted supporters. The thing that really bugs me is that the RWSM is so quick to play this card. It smells of racism.

Regarding the demographics, I, too, wish that the data had been more finely grained. I would be interested to know what those under $20K/yr thought, and I would also like to know how those making, say, more than $1M/yr voted.

I think the main point illustrated is that Lamont got about half of the vote, across the economic spectrum, at least as can be told from this coarse quantization.

Regarding Brooks in general: I don't know how often you get to read his work. Perhaps you see him on TV (which I don't). My take on him, based solely on reading nearly all of his columns since he joined the NYTimes, is that he was originally completely in the neocon camp, but has recently admitted that there might be something wrong with this point of view. I suppose the reason he so often bugs me is that his columns of late tend to indicate some of this awakening, but get tarnished by what scan like mealy-mouthed explanations of why he used to think that way.

Finally, my remark about him being late to the dance on the Connecticut election was not just based on reading the blogosphere. Every MSM publication was filled with analyses, too. But you're right in that he's subject to the realities of writing a twice-weekly column.

I take your point about being little concerned with a primary election in a state on the other side of the country. Possibly I read too much into it; certainly, there has been too much made of it by others; and doubtless, the good people of Connecticut are sick to death of the national attention. But I think it's a non-trivial story, if for no other reason than because dethroning a member of the establishment is always rare. The story also fills me with the hope that my side is finally getting its act together and unifying its voice.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sending me the Brooks' article in its entirety. Having read it, I now think it's not as good as I thought it might be from your comments about it.

Rather than arguing for moderation I see he was arguing mainly for a third McCain/Lieberman party. I don't see the need for that. If you wanted to vote for the war you could have just voted for Bush/Kerry/Biden -- all of whom wanted to increase U.S. soldiers in Iraq. I can't see that McCain- Lieberman would be in any way significantly distinct from other pro-war parties.

Air America postulated that many (14,000) Connecticut voters switched parties from independent to democratic so they could register a vote against the war. In Conn. you have to change parties 90 days prior to the election. 90 days prior to the election nobody was thinking of Lamont as a serious threat to Lieberman, so these were apparently voters who just wanted to vote against the war. That's encouraging, and I think it means that those anti-war voters wouldn't be voting for a McCain/Lieberman ticket because they could see some difference between them and the straight Bush pro-war party line.

Brooks says: "On globalization, the McCain-Lieberman Party believes that free trade
reduces poverty but that government must invest in human capital so people can compete. It believes in comprehensive immigration reform."

I can't recall McCain or Lieberman making any comments about free trade or reducing poverty or the govt investing in human capital. I don't follow them that closely, but I think maybe Brooks is just fantacizing on a mythical party that would be closer to his own heart's desire.

More Brooks:
"The McCain-Lieberman Party counters with constant reminders that country comes before party,"
I think that Brooks meant to say that promoting Lieberman comes before party.

"On policy grounds, too, the McCain-Lieberman Party is distinct. On foreign policy, it agrees with Tony Blair (who could not win a Democratic primary in the U.S. today): The civilized world faces an arc of Islamic extremism that was not caused by American overreaction, and that will only get stronger if America withdraws."

Au contraire, Dave, if not actually caused by American overreaction, it was at least exacerbated by misplaced American reaction. A retaliation against the Taliban and Al Quaida was understood by everyone, but the crusade against Iraq aroused the whole Muslim world and arguably Islamic extremism will increase if the U.S. DOESN'T withdraw from Iraq.

I guess I've come around to your original premise that David Brooks is clueless, Brendan. He's better on TV than he is in print.

bjkeefe said...

Thanks for giving the article some thought, and posting same, TC.

I guess I kind of failed, make that, completely failed, if my original post made you think Brooks's column was good. ;^)

Glad we cleared that up, anyway.

bjkeefe said...

If you've made it this far, you're as bad a political junkie as I am. Therefore, you'll probably be interested in the following.

Andrew Sullivan contrasts Joe Lieberman to John McCain, in terms of degree of sucking up to W, in today's Times.

Not not that one. The British one.

They should be forced to call themselves The London Times, shouldn't they?

Anyway, it's pretty good.

bjkeefe said...

Sorry about the extra T, last comment.

Anonymous said...

You didn't completely fail because you got me to read the whole Brooks column and in the end agree with you that Brooks is clueless. You may have misled me originally with the original post, but it just one of the limitations of the medium we're working in.

Also enjoyed the column from the London Times. I wonder if this is where Brooks got the idea of a McCain/Lieberman ticket? Also interesting that in London they see the potential candidates for Prez in 2008 as McCain, Giuliani, and Gore. No thought of Hillary, Biden or Edwards. I thought Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was his first salvo in a campaign to run, and as much a puff piece for Gore as about global warming.

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