Why did Brooks invoke Coulter?

One of my favorite conservative pundits, New York Times columnist David Brooks, goes off the rails today, writing, "Every cliché Ann Coulter throws at the Democrats is gloriously fulfilled by the Democratic health care bills."

Here's a list of Coulter witticisms about the Democrats, compiled by Media Matters:

• "Democrats are racist, and they're just stunned to find a black man who can walk and talk."
• "The Democrats want Saddam back."
• The Democratic Party is "a party that supports killing, lying, adultery, thievery, envy."
• "[Y]ou just expect Democrats to side with Al Qaeda."
• "I think the problem the Democrats have is, no one really believes they're authentic patriots."
• "I understand why you are so terrified of letting us point out what racists the Democrats are and how they have a big problem with black women."

As for health care, the issue at hand, I can't find much of anything Coulter has said directly about the subject, which makes it doubly puzzling as to why Brooks brought her up in the first place. At AnnCoulter.com, though, I did find this gem from 2007:

• "The only 'crisis' in health care in this country is that doctors are paid too little.... [T]he Democratic Party treats doctors like they're Klan members."

Every so often Brooks, as sharp an analyst as we have, feels the need to re-establish his conservative credentials in the most boneheaded way imaginable. Today was one of those days.

Critiquing Obama's speech in Egypt

They don't come any dumber than U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla. In a piece on local reaction to President Obama's speech in Egypt, Inhofe tells his hometown newspaper, "There has never been a documented case of torture at Guantanamo" and "I just don't know whose side he's on." (Via TPMDC.)

On the other hand, New York Times columnist David Brooks gets right to the heart of the contradictions in Obama's speech, writing:

This speech builds an idealistic facade on a realist structure. And this gets to the core Obama foreign-policy perplexity. The president wants to be an inspiring leader who rallies the masses. He also wants be a top-down realist who cuts deals in the palaces. There is a tension between these two impulses that even a sharp Chicago pol is having trouble managing.

My own reaction: underwhelmed, despite the characteristically first-rate craftsmanship and delivery. I couldn't really articulate why, but I definitely think Brooks is on to it.

David Brooks almost gets it right

David Brooks' column in today's New York Times is smart and useful in its treatment of the similarities between the national-security policies of President Obama and those of George W. Bush after 2003 (though I think a more reasonable date to pick would be 2005), and of the differences between the Bush team and Dick Cheney during the waning years of the Bush White House.

But Brooks misses entirely why Obama has been more successful in selling those policies. It's not just that Obama is more skillful at it, and understands public leadership better than Bush ever did. More than anything, it's that when Bush finally moved away from the abject failures of the Bush-Cheney years, they were his failures.

Bush may have begun doing the right thing — or, at least, he may have begun doing the wrong thing less often — but he no longer had any credibility. Thus, by the time Condoleezza Rice had begun moving foreign policy in a less-insane direction, Bush had already irretrievably cast himself as a malleable tool.

Nor are the choices Obama is making today — on Guantánamo, on torture photos, on military tribunals — the sorts of things that will gain any real support on their own merits. Rather, most reasonable people see them as the least-bad decisions he could make given the "mess" that he inherited from Bush, as he put it yesterday.

Again, not an argument Bush could have made.

Collins and Brooks on Obama

Not only do I like this exchange between New York Times columnists Gail Collins and David Brooks, but I like it more than many of their columns. It's not blogging. It is a conversation — or "The Conversation," as the Times labels it.

It's not that they're finally saying what they really mean — in fact, they've both made essentially the same points in their columns, especially Brooks. It's that their exchange is loose and human in ways that their published work isn't.

I hope "The Conversation" affects their column-writing.

David Brooks' reality-based conservatism

I think this column speaks incredibly well of both Team Obama and David Brooks.

Earlier in the week, Brooks went off on President Obama, characterizing his budget and spending priorities as "a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs," and calling for an alliance between moderate conservatives (such as himself) and moderate liberals to stop Obama's runaway ambitions.

The White House responded to Brooks by laying out its case, arguing that the president hasn't abandoned his preference for a cautious, incremental approach to problem-solving, but had to respond to an unprecedented financial crisis. Given a few years and a little luck, Obama's aides say, and things will be back on track.

Brooks writes:

I didn't finish these conversations feeling chastened exactly....

Nonetheless, the White House made a case that was sophisticated and fact-based. These people know how to lead a discussion and set a tone of friendly cooperation.

I'm guessing that Brooks doesn't think Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party. Or, if he does, he's horrified.

Obama's bankrupt opponents

In recent days I've been struck by the overwhelming nature of the problems that face us, and the utterly bankrupt nature of the conservative response. Because the more mindless of those responses drives me crazy, I will instead present the rational but wrong David Brooks, who writes today:

Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once.

I think Brooks is fundamentally mistaken in his assessment of what the Obama administration would like to do. Everything we know about President Obama tells us that he is an exceedingly cautious politician — a mainstream liberal, not a creature of the far left, who, given his choice, would have liked to proceed deliberately.

He can't. Not with the economy falling apart, the auto industry careening toward bankruptcy, the financial system in meltdown and housing as dead as it's been in decades. (Let's not forget, too, he's also dealing with war and terrorism on multiple fronts.) Finally, as Obama argued during the campaign, a lot of what ails us economically can't be fixed without finally doing something about health care.

In the midst of all this, it is striking that the Republicans have nothing to say. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who will deliver the Republican response to Obama's address to Congress tonight, is getting a weird amount of attention for rejecting about $90 million in federal unemployment assistance — while eagerly grabbing $4 billion in stimulus money.

I don't know if you caught Jindal on "Meet the Press" Sunday, but he came across as Sarah Palin with better syntax: plenty of pre-rehearsed soundbites, but little or no ability to answer moderator David Gregory's simple questions.

It's no wonder that Obama's job-approval rating is so much higher than that of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton at a similar early stage of their presidencies.

Jacoby joins Brooks in getting CBO study wrong

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby today repeats David Brooks' error in using an outdated, incomplete Congressional Budget Office study to argue that President Obama's stimulus package won't inject money into the economy quickly enough to do any good.

Jacoby writes that "less than half of the $355 billion the bill allocates to infrastructure and other 'discretionary' projects would actually be spent by the end of 2010; of that, a mere $26 billion would be spent in the current fiscal year."

Unlike Brooks, Jacoby does credit an accurate source — a Washington Post story from last Wednesday, which makes clear the CBO study's limitations, if not its utter worthlessness. But Jacoby himself doesn't make it clear, thus leaving the same wrong impression as Brooks.

In today's New York Times, David Leonhardt lays out how and why too many in the media got it wrong. And he reports that, on Monday evening, the CBO put out an up-to-date report estimating "that about 64 percent of the money, or $526 billion, would be spent by next September." Here (PDF) is the CBO study to which Leonhardt refers — readily available, as Leonhardt notes, since Monday evening.

I'm not sure when Jacoby's deadline is, but surely he had time to peruse the new study.

Fun with math

New York Times columnist David Brooks used phony numbers yesterday to raise questions about the proposed stimulus package. "A study by the Congressional Budget Office found that less than half of the money for infrastructure and discretionary programs would be spent by Oct. 1, 2010," he wrote.

Trouble is, Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post learned that the study Brooks cites does not exist. (Via Talking Points Memo.)

Obama and the right

In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that President Obama's inaugural address succeeded in separating serious conservatives like David Brooks and Peggy Noonan from right-wing loons like Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin. It's not really about getting conservative support so much as it is expanding the field on which he needs to govern.

David Brooks tries candor

David Brooks presumably has an idea of what his New York Times column should be about. Apparently telling us what he really thinks is not high on his list of priorities.

In the Times, Brooks has expressed — well, reservations about Sarah Palin. At a public event on Monday, he described her as "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party." In the Times, Brooks has been skeptical about Barack Obama. On Monday, he said he's "dazzled."

Well, at least he's straight with us when he's not writing.

"The left's favorite conservative"

Good Howard Kurtz profile today of New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Though I often disagree with Brooks, I've always liked his work. So it was somewhat disconcerting to read that my admiration for Brooks borders on cliché: according to Kurtz, Brooks is "sometimes cast as the left's favorite conservative."

Fair enough. Brooks is, after all a moderate conservative whose views on cultural issues are a lot closer to mine than, say, to Mike Huckabee's.

I thought it took a while for Brooks to find his legs as a Times columnist. His longer pieces in the Weekly Standard and the Atlantic Monthly were terrific. At the Times, though, the tyranny of having to write short and the pressure of being the token conservative seemed to lead him to write agit-prop that I doubted even he believed.

Brooks has long since found his voice, though, as evidenced by his nuanced, shifting view of Barack Obama. Of course, he may just be trying to keep his Obama-supporting wife and kids happy.

Photo (cc) by DoubleSpeak with Matthew and Peter Slutsky and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Further thoughts on the McCain story

Consider this a "thinking out loud" moment in the midst of a still-unfolding story. My take at this point is not particularly coherent, and there's still a lot we don't know — and maybe never will. But here's where we — and I — stand two days after the New York Times reported that John McCain had an improper relationship with a female lobbyist during the 2000 presidential campaign.

Sex shouldn't matter. That's my beginning point in analyzing such a story. Both McCain and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, have denied a sexual relationship, and of course their denials are important. But why is the Times snooping around in McCain's private affairs in the first place? If McCain and Iseman really did hop into bed with each other, that's their business, and the media ought to leave it alone.

This may sound awfully cynical, but I think it's fair to ask, based on what we've learned over the past few decades, how many high-profile politicians have not strayed from their marital vows at one time or another. I suspect it's a very short list. And before you cite Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky as an example of media excess, remember: Clinton was exploiting a young intern in the workplace; there was a perjury angle; and the entire story was being driven by a government investigation. Hardly the same thing.

Anonymous sources aren't the issue. It's what they said. Yes, on-the-record sources are always better than anonymous whispers. But the Times, for all its flaws, is a great paper, and the reporters who worked on this story have a stellar reputation. I take it on faith that their two sources are well-connected and were quoted accurately and in context.

But what did they say? No one said McCain and Iseman were engaged in a sexual affair. Rather, they said the two were spending so much time together that aides were afraid they might be having an affair. Look at the second paragraph of the story:

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client's corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman's access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

McCain adviser John Weaver confirmed, on the record, the gist of that paragraph except for the suspicions about sex. So again, anonymous sources aren't the issue. It's that they offered nothing other than their suspicions that McCain and Iseman were having an affair. How did the Times reach the point that it's reporting unconfirmed suspicions about a presidential candidate on page one?

The Washington Post version kicked butt. Because the Post stayed away from sex, it put together a solid look at how McCain's personal relationship with a lobbyist had played out in his actions as a senator.

The Times, almost embarrassed by its own reporting, sticks in an endless, familiar backgrounder on McCain's involvement as one of the Keating Five before returning to the matter at hand. It reads like a committee effort. By contrast, the Post offers us relevant details about Iseman — who she is, whom she lobbies for, how her clients' needs and desires were attended to by McCain.

Timing is everything. Mitt Romney's campaign was hurt considerably by the Times' dallying on this story between December and this week. As I noted yesterday, there have been some hints that all of this began with a dime-drop from the Romney camp. Times executive editor Bill Keller has said the story didn't run earlier because it wasn't ready.

Let me engage in some wanton speculation. Keller knew the story would have a huge impact on the Republican contest. Could it be that he didn't want to deal a blow to the McCain campaign on the basis of such a thin story? If the Post's fine but wonky effort had come out back when the Republican race was still competitive, it probably wouldn't have caused much harm. It's the sex that could have cost McCain the nomination. The Times promises sex, but doesn't deliver.

The Times' endorsement of McCain is a non-issue. I've heard a number of observers question how the Times could endorse McCain knowing that the Iseman story was in the works. That's nonsensical, given that quality papers maintain a strict separation between the editorial pages and the newsgathering operation — although, as Jay Rosen notes, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. may have known about the story and could have warned off the editorial page.

Besides, the Times' endorsement of McCain was remarkably backhanded, and was mainly an exercise in bashing former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who at that point was still in the race. Given the Times editorial page's liberal world view, it's safe to say that it would have endorsed the relatively moderate McCain no matter who he was or wasn't having sex with. And that it will endorse the Democratic nominee over McCain in November.

It's all or nothing now. It's possible that the story will fizzle. But McCain issued a strong denial yesterday, raising the stakes much higher than he needed to. (Maybe it's because he was telling the truth.) New York Times columnist David Brooks, a McCain cheerleader during his Weekly Standard days in 2000, has a fascinating piece on internal rifts within Camp McCain that concludes with this: "If it turns out that there is evidence of an affair and a meeting, then his presidential hopes will be over."

Speaking of Brooks' cheerleading, I dug up this excerpt from a story I wrote in 2000, when I spent a few days following McCain and his worshipful press throng across South Carolina:

In Brooks's view, many of the reporters certainly have drunk the Kool-Aid, and though they ask tough questions, he notices a lack of bite and follow-up that he doesn't see when the press questions other candidates. "Obviously he's just the coolest guy, and people like cool guys," Brooks says. "Reporters on his campaign enjoy being here, and they don't enjoy being with other candidates."

I also found some stuff I wrote about McCain's exertions on behalf of the Paxson television network, the very issue now being dredged up again. Here's what I wrote about my encounter with the senator in South Carolina:

On the morning of my second day with the campaign, spokesman Todd Harris told me I wasn't going to get on the lead bus. Thus liberated from having to play nice, I hung around the elevator of the Greenville Hilton, waiting for McCain. I got between him and the bus and asked him a question I'd had on my mind for a couple of weeks: whether he was aware that 40,000 Pittsburgh residents were opposed to a television-license transfer that he had urged the Federal Communications Commission to act on and that would benefit one of his campaign contributors.

"No, what I had urged them [the FCC] was to act, not to take a specific position. And that was to order them to act after 700 days of not acting," he replied, repeating an answer he had given many times already. I pressed him on the fact that there was considerable opposition to the transfer, but he didn't drop a beat: "What the citizen activists wanted was an act against, some wanted an act for. I just wanted them to act, so I wasn't in any way harming the views of those citizen-activists. I was asking them to act. Now if I had been asking them to act affirmatively, then that would have somehow been in opposition to those activists. So I don't see how you draw the conclusion that I was in any way in opposition to them."

I wanted to ask a follow-up. His bus was waiting. I said, "Thank you." He said, "Thank you," smiled, asked where I was from, and was on his way, Cindy on one side, an aide on the other.

So much for Straight Talk.

Yesterday I was convinced that this story would be Topic A for political junkies for at least a week. Today I'm not so sure. What I do know is that media analysts will be talking about the New York Times and its standards for some time to come.

Brooks captures Romney perfectly

The most astute commentary I've seen on Mitt Romney's religion speech is David Brooks' column in today's New York Times. Brooks starts out on a positive note, writing, "It is not always easy to blend an argument for religious liberty with an argument for religious assertiveness, but Romney did it well." But then Brooks brings down the hammer:

When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other's passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn't start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people's minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.

The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious.

That's exactly right. Indeed, on "Imus in the Morning," CBS News analyst Jeff Greenfield noted that even President Bush has taken pains not to kiss off non-believers the way Romney did yesterday.

The normally astute Peter Canellos writes in the Boston Globe today that Romney's speech was aimed "at all the people of the United States. With its breadth of spirit, it was the most presidential moment of the 2008 campaign."

I have to disagree. It was a good speech, but hardly a great one. And it was deliberately divisive, aimed not at the American people as a whole but at those evangelical Christians who are thinking of voting for Mike Huckabee.

Right about Reagan

Journalist Lou Cannon, a biographer of Ronald Reagan, sets the record straight in today's New York Times: Despite what David Brooks and James Taranto seem to think, Reagan's appearance in Neshoba, Miss., near Philadelphia, was a huge issue in the 1980 presidential campaign. Cannon writes:

In the wake of Neshoba, Mr. Reagan's critics pounced. President Carter's campaign operatives portrayed Mr. Reagan as a divisive racist. At a money-raising event in Chicago, Mr. Carter told his audience: "You'll determine whether this America will be unified, or, if I lose this election, Americans might be separated black from white, Jew from Christian, North from South, rural from urban."

Cannon's purpose is to absolve the charge that Reagan was a racist, or that his 1980 victory was based on racist appeals to white voters. In doing so, however, Cannon confirms that Brooks and Taranto are wrong to claim such accusations are a recent invention of liberals aimed at tarring Reagan's memory.

Taranto's wrong, too

Maybe after Rupe closes the deal, he'll let Wall Street Journal commentators get LexisNexis accounts. The lack thereof is the only explanation I can think of for James Taranto's endorsement of David Brooks' factually deficient claim that Ronald Reagan's speech in Philadelphia, Miss., was not a big deal during the 1980 campaign.

As I demonstrated last week, it was an enormous issue, with a number of media outlets reporting on what some saw as racial insensitivity on Reagan's part, and with Jimmy Carter's campaign beating the drums on several occasions.

Yet Taranto writes: "Why does Reagan's Philadelphia speech loom so much larger in today's liberal imagination than it did when Reagan was alive and active in politics? Because today's liberals yearn for their elders' moral authority." Nice line. Too bad it depends on believing something that isn't true. Taranto is generally one of the sharper knives in the drawer, but he's wrong about this.

Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood. Some commenters to my previous item think I'm accusing Reagan of having been a racist. I'm not, although he clearly didn't mind playing racial politics on occasion. My interest in this item is based solely on Brooks' factually incorrect notion that the Philadelphia speech was not a big deal until recently. In fact, it was one of the biggest issues of the 1980 campaign. I remember it as someone who lived through it, and my research shows that I'm right and Brooks is wrong.

Hat tip on this to Media Nation reader MTS.

Wrong about Reagan

New York Times columnist David Brooks today claims that Ronald Reagan is being retroactively tainted by a partisan liberal smear of recent vintage. He writes:

It's a distortion that's been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale.

What dastardly deed is Brooks referring to? In August 1980, Reagan's campaign managers decided to kick off the post-convention final push by having the Gipper appear in Philadelphia, Miss., a shrine to the civil-rights movement thanks to the murder of three young activists 16 years earlier. Reagan spoke to a white crowd and endorsed "states' rights," code for segregation. This, Brooks fulminates, is — in some sort of latter-day re-invention — being "taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism."

But though Brooks wants you to believe that the idea of Reagan's general-election campaign beginning with a racially insensitive act is a new one, he's careful to add the caveat that it's "been around for a while." Well, yes. I followed the 1980 campaign avidly. And I distinctly remember that Reagan was accused at the time, repeatedly and vociferously, of playing to the prejudices of white southern voters.

Here's a sampling of coverage from the 1980 campaign:

• Newsweek, Aug. 18: "Reagan's courtship of the black vote last week started out in a way that made many blacks suspicious. Speaking to a nearly all-white crowd at a county fair in Philadelphia, Miss. — the town where three civil-rights workers were murdered in 1964 — he spoke in favor of states' rights, the code words for segregation in the 1950s."
• U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 25: "In early August, Reagan made a three-day trip to Mississippi, New York and Chicago that attracted mixed reviews. He spoke to a mostly white audience at the Neshoba County (Miss.) Fair and declared support for states' rights. The outing may have helped him in a state that Carter narrowly carried in 1976, but it drew criticism from blacks. Neshoba County is where three civil-rights workers were slain by Ku Klux Klansmen in 1964 with the help of local lawmen."
• The Associated Press, Sept. 16: "It was the pulpit of the late Martin Luther King Jr., and Carter invoked his memory in urging that blacks exercise their hard-won right to cast ballots. 'You've seen in this campaign the stirrings of hate and the rebirth of code words like states' rights in a speech in Mississippi and a campaign reference to the Ku Klux Klan relating to the South,' Carter said. 'That is a message which creates a cloud on the political horizon.' "
• The Washington Post, Sept. 28: "Philadelphia, Miss., was the worst place in the world to mention 'states' rights.' Whatever the term might mean to Ronald Reagan now and whatever it might mean to others, it means something else to Jimmy Carter. It was always a code phrase for racism. It did not mean that the state had some sort of right to tell the government to shove it when it came to occupational safety. It meant, bluntly, that the state could deprive blacks of their civil rights and there wasn't a thing the federal government could do about it."
• The New York Times, Oct. 15: "Andrew Young, campaigning on behalf of President Carter, told an audience in Ohio last week that Ronald Reagan's advocacy of 'state's rights' in a speech last August in Philadelphia, Miss., 'looks like a code word to me that it's going to be all right to kill niggers when he's President.' " (The White House distanced itself from that one.)

I could go on (and on), but you get the idea. The point is that, despite what Brooks would like you to believe, Reagan's pit stop in Mississippi was one of the most controversial moments in the 1980 campaign. Liberals didn't start attacking Reagan over that visit a few months ago — they did it repeatedly 27 years ago.

You don't have to believe Reagan was a racist. You just have to look at the record. The truth is contained in Brooks' caveat; the main thrust of his column is a gross distortion.