SmartRemarks

David Brooks, throughout his long history as a pundit, consistently seems to love drawing sweeping generalizations from just a handful of anecdotal examples. Sometimes even just one. In his latest column, he’s resorted to using an imaginary one.

Brooks retells the fable of the ant and the grasshopper through an imaginary middle-American voter he calls “Ben.” Ben is the ant. Ben came from a broken home, but “worked hard” and got “decent grades” and went to a couple of mediocre colleges to study hotel management, in which field he’s worked for the past 20 years, only to find himself increasingly disenchanted with America’s political culture… in a fashion, Brooks imagines, that’s manifested in last Tuesday’s primary results, in which incumbents of both parties got a drubbing. (IMHO a well-deserved one; I was delighted to see Joe Sestak take down Arlen Specter, to see Bill Halter force Blanche Lincoln into a runoff. Even Rand Paul’s victory in Kentucky bodes well from certain angles. And the victory in PA-12’s special election, where Mark Critz (D) defeated Tim Burns (R) in a district that actually swung for McCain in ‘08, was a pleasant surprise that confounded lots of pundits.)

But since Brooks is making up the example to suit his predetermined thesis, he gets to ignore inconvenient realities. His little fable elides quiet a few along the way, some of them rather significant…

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President Obama has the useful political skill of being a chameleon of sorts, looking different depending on context and, especially, the eye of the beholder. By and large this has worked for him; he and his programs are more popular now than when he was elected. All the same, there’s been a great deal of media attention lately to a backlash of sorts against the Obama administration. Most of it comes from the usual suspects, fire-breathers like Rush Limbaugh and his CPAC cohorts. They charge that Obama is doing exactly what he promised (horrors!) and it’s even worse than they expected, and isn’t it terrible how this rush toward Euro-style socialism will be the ruin of this country? We can easily enough dismiss these types as right-wingers who never supported him and never would under any circumstances, and who are too busy right now presiding over the self-destruction of the Republican party to do any great harm.

Some of the criticism is a little more temperate, though… and comes from factions of the right who did at least conditionally support Obama. They’re now arguing that he isn’t what they took him to be, since they thought he was A Moderate Like Them, when in fact he’s A Radical Ideologue. The most prominent invocation of this argument recently showed up in a piece by David Brooks, one of the New York Times‘ pet conservative columnists. He starts by drawing conclusions pretty much the diametrical opposite of my own (and most other analysts’) about Obama’s proposed budget, and veers off wildly from there: Read the rest of this entry »