The old saying “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” comes to mind when reading the latest from the NY Times’ house conservative. We all get fooled or snookered once in a while. I could tell the story of how when I worked for the Texas GOP a mainstream media reporter once grilled me within earshot of Democratic operatives that, being new to town, I didn’t recognize as such. The reporter wanted me to either back down off a tough press release I’d written or reveal the party’s inner workings to him — while the Democrat operatives listened in about two feet away. But I didn’t give him any ground, and when I found out about the trap, I decided never to trust that reporter again. We never got to the “shame on me” part.
But David Brooks has been in “shame on me” mode for years now. The columnist who was swayed by the fine crease of Obama’s pants has now had more than two years to watch the president assail “fat cat bankers” and then declare himself the only thing standing between them and an angry mob. He has had ample time to consider what Obama meant early on, when Republicans objected to his state-centered policies and he replied, simply: “I won.” Brooks has had time to watch Obama push through two massively transformative measures — the first stimulus, and ObamaCare — along purely partisan lines, while the economy continued to burn out.He has had the chance to watch how Obama used czars to get radicals installed into his government, and how he has used the regulatory state to punish American enterprise and our energy industry for the sake of his pet social engineering schemes. He has had time to hear Obama repeatedly lie in blaming the Republicans for blocking his jobs bill in the Senate, when the Democrats control that body and several of them voted against it too.
But the evidence in his latest column says that Brooks has seen none of this.
Obama, who sounded so fresh in 2008, now sometimes sounds a bit like Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi. Obama, who inspired the country, now threatens to run a campaign that is viciously negative. Obama, who is still widely admired because he is reasonable and calm, is in danger of squandering his best asset by pretending to be someone he is not. Obama, a natural unifier and conciliator, seems on the verge of running as a divisive populist while accusing Mitt Romney, his possible opponent, of being inauthentic.
It’s the “pretending to be someone he is not” line that’s the most problematic in that paragraph. In second place, declaring Barack Obama to be a “natural unifier and conciliator.” On the first, Brooks has the timeline reversed: It was the 2008 Obama who was pretending to be someone he is not. The current class warfare supporting, divisive iteration is closer to the truth of Obama. His entire background consists of being on the far left agitative fringe of politics and activism. That’s who he is. That’s the man who launched his political career at the home of terrorist Bill Ayers and who sat in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s hateful church for 20 years. The “Hope and Change” message masked the far left “fundamental transformation” that was and is Obama’s real agenda. And there is no evidence at all, either from his time in Illinois politics or on the national stage, that Barack Obama is a “natural unifier and conciliator.” His voting record put him to the left of Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont. He had never authored anything that attracted true conservative support. Obama is an Alinskyite divider, by choice.
So shame on David Brooks for staying fooled.
Wow, Brooks does seem to be thicker than two planks.
david brooks’ role requires being fooled all of the time
Brooks is so busy gazing at the crease in Obama’s pants that he misses the kris in Obama’s hand.
“A natural unifier and conciliator” Ha ha now that is a whopper! Brooks is either lying or really dense.
David Brooks. For intelligence that is only verbal.
I think you’re all being very unfair. Obama IS a natural unifier.
Seriously, can you name any other President in living memory who had so many disparate groups pissed off at him?
Brooks desperately wants to come out and support Obama again in 2012, if for no other reason than he doesn’t want to admit he was wrong about supporting Obama in 2008. But what’s annoying him is that the more and more Obama gets into his populist, class warfare rhetoric, the more and more David is going to have to turn into an intellectual pretzel to figure out ways to justify his continued support for Obama.
That’s why he’s pleading with Obama to stop running a divisive campaign, so he doesn’t make David Brooks look bad. But in the end, Obama can probably run a class warfare campaign through next summer, and then if he comes out and offers up an insincere apology after Labor Day, and swears he’s going to turn over a new leaf after he’s re-elected, that’s all it’s going to take for Brooks to jump back on the Obama bandwagon.
My God, Brooks is an idiot. This is almost willful blindness. Clearly he hasn’t read (and probably shuns like a vampire does the sun) Stanley Kurtz’s “Radical in Chief.” And if he did he’d probably turn to Frum for reassurance that “it isn’t true.”
You can fool some of the people most of the time; you can fool most of the people some of the time; but, if you have nicely creased pants, you can fool David Brooks all of the time.
“You can’t fix stupid.” – Ron White
More seriously, he is the fake, token Conservative, and if he wants to keep his job, he has to continue the pretense, while supporting the Left. He is in charge of spinning by speaking the Right’s language. The thing is, Conservatives recognize another Conservative within a few minutes. Kinda hard to fool us. It is a fool’s errand, but hey, it’s a living.
He’s not fooled. The fools are those who think he’s anything but a more feminine Jennifer Rubin — a token “conservative” so the paper can say it’s “covering both sides” while actually running agitprop.
At a certain point, you have to figure it’s deliberate.
– read “Bring us together”.
“a natural unifier and conciliator”
do these people actually believe this stuff, or is it all a game to them?
I think the latter, except that it’s not a game, it’s their job.