David Brooks--a conservative who was dead wrong about Obama

"Two personalities inhabit New York Times columnist David Brooks, who, like Christopher Buckley, is a friend. One personality is that of the idealist. On Inauguration Day, the idealist in Brooks claimed that Barack Obama was “a pragmatist, an empiricist” who intended “to realize the endof- ideology politics.” The other personality inhabiting Brooks is that of the realist. It takes a lot to rouse the realist. Trillions of dollars, in fact.

“There is evidence,„ Brooks wrote in early March [2009] about Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget, “of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor. . . . We end up with deficits that are $1 trillion a year and stretch as far as the eye can see. . . . Federal spending as a share of GDP is zooming from its modern norm of 20 percent to an unacknowledged level somewhere far beyond.

“Those of us who consider ourselves moderates—moderate-conservative, in my case—are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was.”

A couple of implications are worth noting. The first is that a deep, recurring pattern of American life has asserted itself yet again: the cluelessness of the elite.

[Christopher] Buckley, [David] Gergen, and Brooks all attended expensive private universities, then spent their careers moving among the wealthy and powerful who inhabit the seaboard corridor running from Washington to Boston. If any of the three strolled uninvited into a cocktail party in Georgetown, Cambridge, or New Haven, the hostess would emit yelps of delight. Yet all three originally got Obama wrong.

Contrast Buckley, Gergen, and Brooks with, let us say, Rush Limbaugh, whose appearance at any chic cocktail party would cause the hostess to faint dead away, or with Thomas Sowell, who occupies probably the most unfashionable position in the country, that of a black conservative.

Limbaugh and Sowell both got Obama right from the very get-go. “Just what evidence do you have,” Sowell replied when I asked, shortly before the election, whether he considered Obama a centrist, “that he’s anything but a hard-left ideologue?” "

Hey, Big Spender | Hoover Institution