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.
When Kennedy voted “NO” on banning partial birth abortions, he was de facto excommunicated from the Catholic Church.
Only the Pope could reinstate him, and I have heard nothing from His Holiness concerning this.
A “perfectly creased” pant leg? My goodness, how it reminds me of this:
“Under the gown, Toohey wore sleeping pajamas of pistachio-green linen … [they] floated about the thin sticks of his ankles. This was just like Toohey, thought Keating; this pose amidst the severe fastidiousness of his living room …”
From Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’, natch. In fact, Brooks as Keating and Obama as Toohey is a pretty darn good match.
I bet the average traveling salesman could hook Brooks up with a great new set of encyclopedias in seconds flat -
“C’mon, this Internet thing is a fad, Mr. Brooks. Trust me.”