The Strange Amnesia of David Brooks

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

I’m generally pretty well disposed toward David Brooks.  We wouldn’t run the country the same way, but he’s not a zealot and he’s usually not boring.  For a biweekly columnist, that’s not bad.

But today’s column feels like it came straight from Sarah Palin’s PR shop with just a light rewrite:

Anxiety is now pervasive….The public’s view of Congress, which ticked upward for a time, has plummeted….There are also warning signs in the Senate….The public has soured on Obama’s policy proposals….Driven by this general anxiety, and by specific concerns, public opposition to health care reform is now steady and stable. Independents once solidly supported reform. Now they have swung against it.

Etc.  You’d think that Obama had been working in a vacuum or something.  There’s not even the briefest mention of the primary cause for all this: the deliberate decision by the Republican Party to hand over the reins to its most extreme wing and adopt a scorched earth counterattack to Obama’s entire agenda.  He agreed to cut the stimulus package by $100 billion and put 40% of it into tax cuts.  That cut no ice.  Democrats proposed a cap-and-trade proposal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions because it uses market mechanisms instead of crude command-and-control directives — and then adopted hundreds of compromises to water it down.  Didn’t matter.  Max Baucus has been “negotiating” over healthcare reform with Republicans in the Senate for months and Obama has been careful not to criticize.  But that turned out to be a charade.  Tim Geithner’s financial bailout plan was limited and business friendly.  No matter.

Independents haven’t “swung against” healthcare reform.  They’ve been the target of a massive campaign of lies and demagoguery.  Brooks says that Obama needs to embrace “fiscal responsibility, individual choice and decentralized authority,” but every time he’s done that it’s gotten him nowhere.  In fact, just the opposite: for the most part these proposals just invite blistering counterattacks from supposedly conservative Republicans.

And contra Brooks, Obama hasn’t moved to the left.  He’s done almost exactly what he said he’d do during the campaign — sometimes to my chagrin.  So what accounts for an entire column on this subject that doesn’t even mention the Republican opposition?  Beats me.  I guess Brooks just finally got tired of reading pieces like this.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate