I don’t often agree with Brooks, and he’s fundamentally an Obama opponent while I’m enthusiastically an Obama supporter. Brooks seems the same reality I do: a serious, pragmatic, tenacious center-left President trying to optimize over a difficult set of constraints.
In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.
Update Some actual data on the coccoon phenomenon, and its exaggeration in the Blogosphere, here.
elliottg says
Actually, you are turning into David Brooks.
Mark Kleiman says
Yes, except that I'm for everything Brooks is against, starting with Obamacare.
eb says
In the linked article. Brooks writes:
See, to some of us, either way that is a problem.
More generally, articles like this – along with over-enthusiastic cheerleading – may have the effect of dissuading some supporters from "making" the President do what he purportedly wants to do, as FDR is said to have requested. In the case of this blog I'm sure it's unintentional, but have less confidence in Mr. Brook's sincerity of purpose.
kalkaino says
In a sensible country Obama would be seen for the go-along-to-get-along unpincipled bungler that he is. With his early declaration that he wants to 'look forward, not back' (at Bush Junta crimes and war crimes) he announced to the GOP that he has no real stomach for a fight no matter how balatant or grievous the offense, no matter how nauseating the agenda. All that could happen, all that will happen, after that, is that he will get punked over and over again until he finally slinks out of town on the wave of revulsion he deserves. The people who voted for him, however, deserve much better.
foulmouthedwife says
Yeah, it was weird to have a Brooks column that seemed to have a modicum of sense to it. Doesn't make you him to think so.
paul says
I'm not sure that "offending" is the right word here. Outside the rather large group of "conservative" dead-enders who are offended by the very idea that Obama is president, how many people are actually offended by his policies? Some on the left, but all I see in the right-wing elites is faux outrage, not real offense.