Dispatches From The Trouser Press

As Sister Toldjah highlights in this excerpt, the New Republic spots Young David Brooks In Love:

In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”

Talk about walking a fine line — who decides a first term senator is going to be president based on the crease in his trousers? (And to avoid the mere appearance of sexism — a mortal sin for any employee of the Gray Lady — did Brooks examine the creases in Hillary’s pantsuits as well?) On the other hand, it does help to explain why so far at least, President Obama seems to be governing, in more ways than one, from the seat of his pants.

Update: Not surprisingly, Stacy McCain is teeing off on Bobo Number One.