David Brooks Reveals Not-So-Secret Reason for Mancrush on Obama: "I divide people into people who talk like us and who don’t talk like us"

By "us," he means dime-a-dozen pundits.

Cheap date, eh?

Another bit of fun there actually comes from Obama. When Brooks showed up with genuine Republican pundits to chat with him over dinner, Obama greeted him by asking, "What are you doing here?" (i.e., "Are you sure you're with the right group?").

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.”

...

Brooks concedes that his place on the political spectrum has shifted somewhat over the years. “I used to think conservatives were right about the big things--the Soviet Union, economic growth,” he explains. “Now, on a lot of issues, I think liberals have been right about some big things, like rising inequality. Both sides of the education divide are within the Democratic Party. . . . The Republicans are sitting this one out. And, then, the war in Iraq has caused me to rethink things in a much more modest [way], and that is Burkean, too.”

He recognizes something similar in the current president. “Obama sees himself as a Burkean,” Brooks says. “He sees his view of the world as a view that understands complexity and the organic nature of change.” Moreover, after the Bush years, Brooks seems relieved to have an intellectual in the White House again. “I divide people into people who talk like us and who don’t talk like us,” he explains. “Of recent presidents, Clinton could sort of talk like us, but Obama is definitely--you could see him as a New Republic writer. He can do the jurisprudence, he can do the political philosophy, and he can do the politics. I think he’s more talented than anyone in my lifetime. I mean, he is pretty dazzling when he walks into a room. So, that’s why it’s important he doesn’t fuck this up.”

More accurately, that's why it's important that David Brooks and other MSM bootlickers cover up Obama's failures. Obama already has FUBARed the nation. There is no un-FUBARing it, at least not without a regime change.

So Plan B is simply to spin his failures into glowing successes.

Updated: Right right right right. I had wanted to include that business about Brooks thinking Obama would be a great president based partly upon his immaculately creased pantleg.

AHFF Geoff reminded me so I put it in.

That is Matthews level. Or below Matthews level.

I wonder what sartorial detail and/or badge of privileged elite upbringing did it for Chris "Rara Avis" Buckley. Maybe the jaunty, elegant manner in which he converted payoffs from Tony Rezko into a fashionable home.

posted by Ace at 03:53 PM

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