Brooks Takes To The Schoolyard

Look, David Brooks is an ass, and a dishonest one at that, and we all know that. But his little taunt at Obama for being weak with liberal lion Congresscritters rings incredibly false to me:

The House bill adds $239 billion to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It would pummel small businesses with an 8 percent payroll penalty. It would jack America’s top tax rate above those in Italy and France. Top earners in New York and California would be giving more than 55 percent of earnings to one government entity or another [...]

Who’s going to stop this leftward surge? Months ago, it seemed as if Obama would lead a center-left coalition. Instead, he has deferred to the Old Bulls on Capitol Hill on issue after issue.

Machiavelli said a leader should be feared as well as loved. Obama is loved by the Democratic chairmen, but he is not feared. On health care, Obama has emphasized cost control. The chairmen flouted his priorities because they don’t fear him. On cap and trade, Obama campaigned against giving away pollution offsets. The chairmen wrote their bill to do precisely that because they don’t fear him. On taxes, Obama promised that top tax rates would not go above Clinton-era levels. The chairmen flouted that promise because they don’t fear him.

Last week, the administration announced a proposal to take Medicare spending decisions away from Congress and lodge the power with technocrats in the executive branch. It’s a good idea, and it might lead to real cost savings. But there’s no reason to think that it will be incorporated into the final law. The chairmen will never surrender power to an administration they can override.

I don't even know where to begin. The House bill is deficit-neutral and Brooks is simply lying about the increase in the deficit by relying on a partial score of it. Obama has vowed repeatedly not to sign a bill without deficit neutrality. The top tax rate nonsense comes before deductions, and whatever his magic calculator says, the effective tax rate for the rich has been dropping consistently over the past decade in the age of Bush, and returning to a real progressive tax system and adding brackets, wherever they fall, while moving away from the historically low tax burden on the wealthy is simply what needs to be done to fix the crisis of the uninsured and repair the nation.

But beyond that, Brooks engages in this taunt about Obama not being feared by liberal chairmen who overreached on the bill. That's just an ignorant statement. Americans, even with softening approval ratings for Obama's handling of domestic issues, still find him eminently superior to Republicans on virtually every score.

I think the straightforward reading of this survey data is that congressional Democrats ought to ignore congressional Republicans and pass the ideas Barack Obama has proposed. And, again, the straightforward reading of November’s election results was that the public wanted (1) Barack Obama to be President and (2) members of congress sympathetic to Barack Obama. Congressional Democrats are good at overthinking political issues, and at coming up with rationalizations for why giving in to special interest demands are the only politically feasible option, but the evidence suggests that the public remains enthusiastic about Obamaism.

Never do we hear a word about "conservative overreach" from our media, only that the liberal hippies are daring to try and deliver some measure of security and stability into American's lives.

But moving on to Obama's "capitulation" on this issue, Brooks might want to look at the calendar. The bill hasn't gotten through Congress yet. It certainly hasn't congealed into a final version. The MedPAC proposal which Brooks praises, that the CBO won't really score, is dismissed by the journalist because "the chairmen will never surrender power". How the heck does he know? I don't think the liberals in the House wanted 40% tax cuts in the stimulus - the White House got their way (I completely disagreed with it, too). Likewise, Obama basically said yesterday not to worry about some provisions of the bill, because in conference, he'll take care of it.

The House bills and the Senate bills will not be identical. We know this. The politics are different, because the makeup of the Senate and the House are different and they operate on different rules. I am not interested in making the best the enemy of the good. There will be a conference committee where the House and Senate bills will be reconciled, and that will be a tough, lengthy and serious negotiation process.

I am less interested in making sure there's a litmus test of perfection on every committee than I am in going ahead and getting a bill off the floor of the House and off the floor of the Senate. Eighty percent of those two bills will overlap. There's going to be 20 percent that will be different in terms of how it will be funded, its approach to the public plan, its pay-or-play provisions. We shouldn't automatically assume that if any of the bills coming out of the committees don't meet our test, that there is a betrayal or failure. I think it's an honest process of trying to reconcile a lot of different interests in a very big bill.

Conference is where these differences will get ironed out. And that's where my bottom lines will remain: Does this bill cover all Americans? Does it drive down costs both in the public sector and the private sector over the long-term. Does it improve quality? Does it emphasize prevention and wellness? Does it have a serious package of insurance reforms so people aren't losing health care over a preexisting condition? Does it have a serious public option in place? Those are the kind of benchmarks I'll be using. But I'm not assuming either the House and Senate bills will match up perfectly with where I want to end up. But I am going to be insisting we get something done.

I'm not really endorsing a closed process where activists have little influence. The point being, Brooks is being disingenuous claiming that Obama is getting steamrolled by the Congress. He is using the Republican block-and-tackle strategy to attack Obama by attacking this bill. And most of the traditional media is following along.

And really, if ANYONE is going to talk critically about deferring to the "Old Bulls on Capitol Hill," it shouldn't be David Brooks.

The Magic Calculator

David Brooks has a new calculator where he adds state and local taxes to income taxes and comes up with a super duper number to show the burden on the henpecked rich:

BROOKS: You know, they made some progress on the Hill, they got a House bill out, they got a Senate bill moving forward. They’re scaring the dickens out of the moderates in their own party, let alone the Republicans. They’re scaring the dickens out of them because the House bill calls for raising the top tax rate to 52 or in some cities, 57%. That’s higher than in France, Spain, Italy…

Magically, Brooks neglects that other little line item on the tax form - the part with all the deductions. In many states, you can deduct your federal taxes on your state taxes. And then there's the deductions for mortgage interest, and charity, and every phone call you have with someone in your business, and every dinner, and all of the other hundreds if not thousands of deductions and credits and givebacks available to those in the top tax rate, not to mention tax shelters and numbered Swiss bank accounts and the like.

There's only one tax rate that matters, and that's the effective tax rate, measuring the amount of money individuals actually pay to the federal government. The effective tax rate for the top 1% was down to 31.2% in 2006, down measurably from the previous year and at an almost historical low.

Now, maybe some of those Democrats in wealthy districts could get out their calculators and explain this to their constituents, but I think they all have David Brooks' calculator model.

David Brooks As Irene Cara In Fame

A very strange remark from David Brooks.

BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.

HARWOOD: What?

BROOKS: I can only imagine what happens to you guys.

O’DONNELL: Sorry, who was that?

BROOKS: I’m not telling you, I’m not telling you.

You can speculate about whether or not Brooks was giving this old codger a little thrill up his leg in exchange for some access, or just being ridiculously overly polite, but I will say that in this day and age, the line between prostitution and journalism is little more than a difference in the employer's choice of Cadillac tail fins and fedoras.

Senate Passes Omnibus Spending Bill

Good. Let's get this the hell out of the way and move forward. The earmark debate is so side-splittingly misinformed I can hardly stand it. Even Eric Boehlert couldn't hold off the stupid today. It's not just that earmarks are a small percentage of the bill, maybe 1-2%. It's that their inclusion in a spending bill DOESN'T CHANGE THE OVERALL AMOUNT OF SPENDING. Earmarks are a technical term of art whereby representatives of the people direct small pieces of funding instead of government bureaucrats. It kills me that it takes Bob Frickin' Bennett to point out this fact, which kind of makes the whole debate completely pointless.

BENNETT: First, let me make several things clear that you perhaps don't understand. Number one, if the money were not earmarked for this purpose it would still be spent. That is, the Department of Agriculture would be spending it somewhere else. And you would not be saving a dime if you eliminate these earmarks.

Is that so damn hard? Why can't one Democratic lawmaker, or anyone from the Obama Administration, make this simple point. After that, all you're arguing about is the size of the spending. And given that the economy is falling off a cliff and no other sector is creating demand, you simply don't get far with an argument that government should be tightening its belt at this juncture. That would fall under things the willfully ignorant say, or to be redundant, things cable television news anchors say.

(By the way, I agree with exceedingly little in BoBo Brooks' article other than these sentences: "The House minority leader, John Boehner, has called for a federal spending freeze for the rest of the year. In other words, after a decade of profligacy, the Republicans have decided to demand a rigid fiscal straitjacket at the one moment in the past 70 years when it is completely inappropriate." Brooks is so thick he actually contradicts himself on this later in the column.)

This whole debate has been a perfect example of the dumbing down of America.

Oh My Jindal

These responses to State of the Unions are very, very hard to make work. The President talks from a rostrum in front of a live and raucous audience, basking in the glory of every politician in Washington, and then out trots the responder, in a state house or some crappy looking set, in a canned environment, with no drama at all. It's like watching The Dark Knight and downshifting into Antiques Roadshow. Democrat after Democrat tried them and failed miserably (Kathleen Sebelius, Harry Reid, Gary Locke, Tim Kaine), and Jim Webb's success is a testament to his oratorical skills.

So that's the preamble. All that said, Bobby Jindal just ended his career for national office tonight. And not just because of the necessary downshift in rhetoric - although yes, the Kenneth from 30 Rock jokes are completely accurate - but because of the terrible, terrible content. I agree with Ezra Klein:

On MSNBC, Matthews said that "the only space Obama has left open in America is on the far-right." And Jindal's speech is proving it: It's like a time capsule. "Dangerous enemies still seek our destruction." "The strength of America is not found in our government." "Democratic leaders in Washington place their hope in the federal government. We place our hope in you."

Beyond that, it's a speech that Boehner could have given in 2007 and that Frist could have given in 2005 and that Lott could have given in 1998 and that Gingrich could have given in 1993. Jindal made a mistake accepting the GOP's invitation to give this response. Yesterday, he seemed like a different kind of Republican. Today, he doesn't.

It's almost too easy for Obama to compete against these guys. For example, did Jindal really invoke Hurricane Katrina as an example of governmental mismanagement? I know we've collectively as Americans have decided to forget George Bush, but does Jindal really not think we have a long-term memory? Worse, the second half of his Katrina story - yes, a Republican REPEATEDLY brought up Katrina, is actually a brazen lie:

Let me tell you a story.

During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I’d never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: ‘Well, I’m the Sheriff and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me!’ I asked him: ‘Sheriff, what’s got you so mad?’ He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go - when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn’t go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, ‘Sheriff, that’s ridiculous.’ And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: ‘Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!’ Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.

There is a lesson in this experience: The strength of America is not found in our government. It is found in the compassionate hearts and enterprising spirit of our citizens.

Read the whole story at the link. He completely made this up. He also lied about the mythical "Las Vegas to Disneyland" HSR line. He lied about how the public "has never even seen" the stimulus bill, when it's up on a public website. He lied about how Democrats want to "dismantle our defenses." He criticized "something called volcano monitoring," which consists of, you know, monitoring volcanoes, which is a simple action to try to prevent natural disasters. And he tried to cast Obama as a pessimist moments after he gave one of the most optimistic, opportunity-in-chaos speeches I've seen in at least 20 years. This guy is a Rhodes scholar and by all accounts a policy wonk. To appeal to conservatives, he has determined that his only chance is to sound like a lying, blithering idiot.

In short, he offered the same tired conservative tropes which were almost unanimously rejected at the polls last November and have been even more rejected in the weeks and months since. And key conservatives know this. David Brooks read Jindal the riot act tonight.

JIM LEHRER: Now that, of course, was Gov. Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, making the Republican response. David, how well do you think he did?

DAVID BROOKS: Uh, not so well. You know, I think Bobby Jindal is a very promising politician, and I oppose the stimulus because I thought it was poorly drafted. But to come up at this moment in history with a stale "government is the problem," "we can't trust the federal government" - it's just a disaster for the Republican Party. The country is in a panic right now. They may not like the way the Democrats have passed the stimulus bill, but that idea that we're just gonna - that government is going to have no role, the federal government has no role in this, that - In a moment when only the federal government is actually big enough to do stuff, to just ignore all that and just say "government is the problem, corruption, earmarks, wasteful spending," it's just a form of nihilism. It's just not where the country is, it's not where the future of the country is. There's an intra-Republican debate. Some people say the Republican Party lost its way because they got too moderate. Some people say they got too weird or too conservative. He thinks they got too moderate, and so he's making that case. I think it's insane, and I just think it's a disaster for the party. I just think it's unfortunate right now.

Put it this way - when Fox News is slamming your performance, and you're a Republican, you've laid an egg.

...question: did the Washington Post go ahead and remove this Michael Gerson mash note to Jindal from their morning edition, out of embarrassment?

Sitting Down With Our Enemies

Barack Obama fulfilled a campaign promise yesterday, even before his inauguration, by negotiating with his enemies.

President-elect Barack Obama spent Tuesday evening at a dinner party with several prominent conservative columnists, including William Kristol and David Brooks of The New York Times, according to an Obama transition pool report.

Mr. Obama, who has been staying at the Hay-Adams Hotel in advance of his inauguration next week, arrived at 9 Grafton Street, an upscale address in Chevy Chase, Md., at 6:34 p.m. The Montgomery County property tax records list this address as the home of the conservative Washington Post columnist George Will, the host of the dinner party. Also attending the party was Charles Krauthammer The Washington Post. Together, some of the columnists at the dinner party have been some of Mr. Obama’s severest critics.

I'm of two minds on this. Much like elevating Rick Warren, this elevates the likes of Kristol and Brooks as if they are serious folk whose ideas must be respected. However, it's only a dinner, and as I said, it was a campaign promise. Not to mention the fact that it's straight out of the counterinsurgency textbook:

One of the more frustrating aspects of counterinsurgency involves talking to the people who were recently shooting at you -- sometimes while they're shooting at you. Often that gets misinterpreted as softness, but it's more of a recognition that the only way to achieve a true victory is by co-opting your opponents. What looks like a decisive victory one day can easily be overturned by a simmering sense among the vanquished that they have no place in the new regime, and therefore have little recourse besides resistance. The objective in launching these sorts of parleys with your opponents is two-fold. First, to see if they can be placated, and whether the price of doing so is acceptable. And second, to visibly demonstrate to the broader population that you've taken every reasonable step at reaching out to these adversaries -- so if they rebuke you and you counterattack, you look like the reasonable party and they look like the rejectionists. It's generally a sound strategy, and it's achieved real results.

One final point - the Obama mantra of talking to people who disagree with him has so far not spread to his liberal critics. Hopefully that dinner will be organized soon. It should be - otherwise there's a certain imbalance to the effort.

UPDATE: The report is that Obama met with liberal columnists this morning.

Today's group included the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne and Eugene Robinson, the Wall Street Journal's Jerry Seib, National Journal's Ron Brownstein, the New York Times Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, among others.

While I'm glad Rachel was in the room, these aren't CRITICS, by and large, nor are most of them even liberals. This is the typical thinking in Washington, where the range of policy ideas ranges from the Weekly Standard to The New Republic. Put the President-elect in a room with Arianna Huffington, Robert Scheer, Katha Pollitt, Katrina vanden Heuvel, maybe a few liberal bloggers. That would say something.

And Again And Again And Again

McCain's campaign touts Obama's association with Bill Ayers: then his endorsement list includes the President of the Annenberg Foundation, the originator of the board where Obama and Ayers sat jointly.

Sarah Palin calls Obama un-American and his associations troubling, and then it turns out the secessionist party where she spoke and to which her husband belongs has a virulently anti-American streak and ties to Iran.

McCain and Palin criticize Obama for talking about US troops causing civilian casualties in Afghanistan when McCain did the same thing with respect to Bosnia.

McCain says you need to speak softly and carry a big stick in foreign affairs and yet he's the guy who sang "Bomb Iran" and called for the annihilation of North Korea and a quick commencement of war with Iraq.

Conservatives get peeved at Obama's correct pronunciation of the word "Pakistan," when... oh geez, where do I begin?

This is getting ridiculous now. It's become a campaign of projection. They criticize Obama while implicitly criticizing themselves. And it's all substance-free, as they have no use for ideas.

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

The only thing wrong about that is the notion that the Republican Party was ever a party of ideas in the first place (sorry, Barack, they weren't. They were about hiding behind the fig leaf of "ideas" to promote profit-taking for the rich).

...This is brilliant, by the way.

Said Obama: "I am surprised that, you know, we've been seeing some pretty over-the-top attacks coming out of the McCain campaign over the last several days, that he wasn't willing to say it to my face. But I guess we've got one last debate. So presumably, if he ends up feeling that he needs to, he will raise it during the debate."

This will make McCain mental, since he can't say it to his face or all the remaining independent support will wither. McCain is boxed in and now he's being called out as a coward. Great strategy.

The Wrath Of New York Times Editorialists

Is it me, or have the columnist for the Times become strikingly more abrasive toward John McCain lately? Not just the ones you'd expect, like Frank Rich:

SARAH PALIN makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday night. By the time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech — longer even than Barack Obama’s — you half-expected some brazen younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him a gold watch and the bum’s rush.

Still, attention must be paid. McCain’s address, though largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy, reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn’t smug or nasty.

The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.

But the typically more sclerotic Bob Herbert has eaten his Wheaties:

Ignorance must really be bliss. How else, over so many years, could the G.O.P. get away with ridiculing all things liberal?

Troglodytes on the right are no respecters of reality. They say the most absurd things and hardly anyone calls them on it. Evolution? Don’t you believe it. Global warming? A figment of the liberal imagination [...]

Why liberals don’t stand up to this garbage, I don’t know. Without the extraordinary contribution of liberals — from the mightiest presidents to the most unheralded protesters and organizers — the United States would be a much, much worse place than it is today.

Even Republican David Brooks offers a throwaway line in an otherwise banal column that ought to prick up America's ears:

The Republicans are intellectually unfit to govern right now, but balancing with Democrats, they might be able to do some good.

Editorialists from the NYT often appear on chattering class shows and other journalists look to them to understand the themes of the campaign. It'll be interesting to see if lines like "The Republicans are intellectually unfit to govern right now" get repeated.

People's Republic Of Perspective

So yeah, the Chinese added some computer-generated fireworks to the opening ceremonies, and one of the singers was lip-synching. Somehow I don't think these are the worst things the Chinese have ever done; I think the whole authoritarian police state that represses sovereign nations and commits untold human rights abuses. I'll give them the lip-synching.

In other news, apparently David Brooks performs the same reductivist psychobabble on foreign nationals that he does on Americans.

If A Tree Falls In Iraq, And No One Is There To Hear It...

This David Brooks op-ed and this analysis of network news coverage on Iraq and Afghanistan couldn't be more related. Brooks wants us to believe that the surge made everything all better in Iraq when anyone who's actually been paying attention knows that the drop in violence did nothing to bring the country together or reconcile the disparate factions, and we're essentially keeping our finger in the dike until we eventually must leave, without any idea what will happen afterwards. Now, even readers of the New York Times are not likely to know that, because Iraq has been blocked from our memories.

The three major US networks are only dedicating an average of 2 minutes per week to coverage of the war in Iraq according to the New York Times. The report is based on information gathered by a TD consultant who found that CBS evening news spent the least amount of time reporting on the Iraq war, followed by ABC world news and NBC nightly news, respectively.

Among the information not reaching US citizens is that there have been more than 1 million Iraqi deaths since the beginning of the 2003 US invasion, with anywhere from 600 000 to 1.2 million of them being violent. The underreporting of events in Iraq has also left US citizens largely unaware of the millions of Iraqi widows of war and 5 million displaced Iraqi citizens. Some direct blame at the Pentagon for the US public's ignorance of the large number of deaths, but Donald Rumsfeld defends the Department of Defense by insisting that they "don't do body counts on other people."

It isn't just Iraqis that are going unnoticed, however. The US news is even failing to report or show their own soldiers returning home in body bags. Lara Logan, a foreign correspondent for CBS news commented on this issue asking "who in America knows what [the body of a dead American soldier] looks like" and saying that "the American soldiers do feel forgotten."

Of course they feel forgotten - they ARE forgotten. And they've been used as political pawns by people like Brooks for over five years.

This idea that a drop in violence - but not a cessation, mind you, more Americans died just today and there are still upwards of 500 casualties a month, the equivalent of two 9-11s every single month, inside Iraq - takes the war out of the spotlight and allows Bush defenders and warmongers to claim victory is silly, especially because they keep Iraq in the sweet spot between "everything's dandy" and "if we leave there will be nothing but chaos." Those two positions are irreconcilable. There are a number of factors leading to the drop in violence, but an additional American presence is something that Howard Dean was calling for in 2003. And anyway, the larger point is that we're not creating an Iraq that is sustainable without that very large presence, which does not serve our national security in any way. As Matthew Duss puts it:

Leaving aside the fact that [the surge's] "victory" as Gerecht defines it, in addition to obviously representing a monumental climbdown from each and every one of the numerous justifications previously offered for the war, does not actually add up to "an Iraqi state" as much as to "a series of armed militia communities we're going to call Iraq," was this outcome really worth 4,000 American dead, over 28,000 wounded, and, by the end of 2008, some $600 billion in American treasure? Was it worth over half a million Iraqi dead, many times that maimed, and some 3 million displaced? Was it worth creating an open source laboratory for terrorists to develop and sharpen their tactics against the most technologically advanced military in the world, enabling them disseminate those tactics around the world via internet? Was it worth losing a thousand dollars at poker just to win twenty at blackjack?

This is reinforced by a GAO report released yesterday showing no long-term strategy for the war, outside of maintaining fragile security gains. This is a prelude to a long-term occupation but not the withdrawal we all know must come absent a military draft.

While agreeing with the administration that violence has decreased sharply, a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office concluded that many other goals Bush outlined a year and a half ago in the "New Way Forward" strategy remain unmet.

The report, after a bleak GAO assessment last summer, cited little improvement in the ability of the Iraqi security forces to act independently of the U.S. military, and noted that key legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament had not been implemented while other crucial laws had not been passed. The report also judged that key Iraqi ministries spent less of their allocated budgets last year than in previous years, and said that oil and electricity production had repeatedly not met U.S. targets.

Bush's strategy of January 2007, the GAO said, "defined the original goals and objectives that the Administration believed were achievable by the end of this phase in July 2008." Not meeting many of them changed circumstances on the ground and the pending withdrawal of the last of the additional U.S. forces mean that strategy is now outdated, the report said. The GAO recommends that the State and Defense departments work together to fashion a new approach.

But David Brooks wants to tell you that Bush was right, the surge is working, and will not address the larger concerns. And you'll never see this on the nightly news unless you're very lucky. You may hear something like commanders in Afghanistan lamenting the lack of equipment because of Iraq, but the context of how we have no national security goals in Iraq, but plenty in Afghanistan, and the imbalance is striking and completely perverse, will not get a hearing. Afghanistan CLEARLY needs more help. Attacks are up 40% in some regions, and more US troops died there than in Iraq last month. What Iraq needs more than anything is an exit strategy. The government is not functional, the state is not cohesive, and no amount of military referees policing, arming and funding all sides of a potential civil war is going to reconcile these facts.

Brooks creates a hermetically sealed open-and-shut case, but it's, for lack of a better word, an ignorant one. Which mirrors the public view of the war. Because the information, while not concealed, is not readily available. Less people dying is not a strategy for victory, and permanent occupations are not a cause for celebration.

Bobo's World

It's a couple days old, but is there any greater indication of the vapidity of the elite press corps than this statement by David Brooks?

BROOKS: Well, the movement hit some natural parameters among highly educated, affluent people, people who live in places like Portland, Oregon. There is a movement, and that movement is still going on. And it's big. It's a big, historic movement, but the magic is not felt by a lot of people. It's not felt, obviously, by a lot of less educated people, downscale people. They just look at Obama, and they don't see anything. And so, Obama's problem is he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who could go into an Applebee's salad bar, and people think he fits in naturally there. And so he's had to change to try to be more like that Applebee's guy, and as he's done that, he's become much more transactional, much more, "I'm going to deliver this, and this, and this for you" on policy.

There are no salad bars at Applebee's. And I'd be willing to bet that David Brooks only knows "Applebee's" from passing one in his taxi on the way from the hotel to the airport. He's the least authentic human in America - the elite journalist. And yet he's somehow "connected" to what people in the heartland think.

For the next 5 months, we're going to hear these people again and again, saying how "real people don't connect with Obama" and "McCain has that authentic touch." Don't believe them. They have no idea what they're talking about. And I think a key to this election is whether or not the majority of the public recognizes this.

Shorter Paul Krugman

David Brooks can't handle the truth.

(a little backstory. Ronald Reagan may or may not have been a racist, but he openly appealed to racists to win the Presidency. David Brooks is shocked that St. Reagan would be "slandered" by such a characterization. Paul Krugman spends 800 words calling him a fool.)

So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that “I believe in states’ rights,” he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.

Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.

When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.

When, in 1976, he talked about working people angry about the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store, he didn’t mean to play into racial hostility.

Read the whole thing. In the faded mists of history, Republicans wouldn't dare see their hero Ronnie as anything but a kindly saint. They're wrong.

Defense Against the Dark Arts

My vote for the most significant contributions to political science this year: neuroscience applied to voter psychology. We've seen a flurry of books (such as Drew Westen's excellent The Political Brain) and monographs delving into the emotional processing of information, which in turn help elucidate political behavior.

Political scientists (and consultants) have long gazed upon the surface effects of neurons invisibly reaching out and forging connections as information is taken in with frustrated puzzlement. But we're getting an ever clearer picture of how opinions are formed and ideas reinforced.

Glancing at the NYT's home page just now, I saw the name "Drew Westen" and eagerly clicked to the article... which turned out to be a David Brooks column. It's been quite a while since I bothered to follow the semolina trail of his noodlings. But I can't quite claim to be shocked, shocked that Brooks seems to have reviewed a book other than the one in bookstores appearing under the same title.

Here's Brooks' conclusion about Westen's work:

The core problem with Westen’s book is that he doesn’t really make use of what we know about emotion. He builds on the work of Antonio Damasio, without applying Damasio’s conception of how emotion emerges from and contributes to reason.

In this more sophisticated view, emotions are produced by learning. As we go through life, we learn what cause leads to what effect. When, later on, we face similar situations, the emotions highlight possible outcomes, drawing us toward some actions and steering us away from others.

In other words, emotions partner with rationality. It’s not necessary to dumb things down to appeal to emotions. It’s not necessary to understand some secret language that will key certain neuro-emotional firings. The best way to win votes — and this will be a shocker — is to offer people an accurate view of the world and a set of policies that seem likely to produce good results.

This is how you make voters happy.

Now, I do share Brooks' sentiment that political campaigns limit their energies to presenting cogent, rational arguments. But wishing doesn't make it so. I don't see how you can read The Political Brain and deny that tracks are laid down and reinforced through emotions via neural networks.

Most people - you, me, David Brooks - believe we've arrived at an opinion rationally. In fact, we derive our opinions emotionally but then convince ourselves afterward that our opinions have a logical basis.

Here's a selection from Westen, explaining the evolution of the brain in our protohominid ancestors. Appearing later than the cerebrum, the amygdala

is involved in many emotional processes, from identifying and responding to emotional expressions in others, to attaching emotional significance to events, to creating the intensity of emotional experience, to generating and linking feelings of fear to experiences.

Researchers first began to understand the functions of the amygdala decades ago, when they found that destroying a region of the brain in monkeys that later turned out to include the amygdala produced a peculiar syndrome. The monkeys no longer seemed to understand the emotional significance of objects in their environment, even though they had no trouble recognizing, identifying, or remembering them. They would eat feces or other inedible objects that normally elicited disgust or indifference, and they were no longer afraid of things that had previously led to fear. With "reason" intact but emotion incapacitated, these monkeys were generally unable to use their emotions to guide their behavior.

The amygdala can respond to stimuli even when the person has no awareness of having seen them. Presenting a threatening stimulus subliminally (i.e., so quickly that the person cannot report seeing it) can lead to activation of the amygdala, suggesting an emotion system that is constantly processing emotionally relevant information faster than we can consciously register it.

Goodness knows I'm not pleased to contemplate neuroscientists rappelling out of their ivory towers to join the ranks of K Street consulting firms. But such conclusions have already been incorporated into many an id-tickling message. And like it or not, we're going to see more Junior Roves earning their merit badges in subliminally negative advertising.

We return to Brooks for a moment to loop back to the top of his article, in which he adds a dash of sarcasm to his brief Cook's Tour of arguments from what he calls the "Why Democrats Lose" genre:

First, Democrats lose because they are too intelligent. Their arguments are too complicated for American voters. Second, Democrats lose because they are too tolerant. They refuse to cater to racism and hatred. Finally, Democrats lose because they are not good at the dark art of politics. Republicans, though they are knuckle-dragging simpletons when it comes to policy, are devilishly clever when it comes to electioneering. They have brilliant political consultants like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, who frame issues so fiendishly, they can fool the American people into voting against their own best interests.

Now why would one possibly conclude that Republicans frequently run on anything other than The Issues? What a mystery.

And I leave it to Brooks to defend Republicans' stellar domestic and foreign policy achievements lo these past six years. (I think he's onto something with the "knuckle-dragging simpletons," though.)

What's amusing here is that Brooks is chortling his way around an interesting explanation for what we can manifestly see with our own eyes. We've seen the effects; now we have a better idea of the cause.

As perhaps the best example, most of us have noticed - how to put it? - a certain pattern in terror alerts over the years. Anyone save those with a Republican axe to grind have known that these urgent bulletins about some phantom plot unraveled or the arrest for the 27th time of Al Qaeda's Number 3 man coincided with the political calendar. Armchair pontificators and official pundits alike also assume that constant invocations of terror redound to Republicans. They couldn't tell you exactly why - but it seems to be a fair supposition.

Now we're starting to flesh out that picture. John Judis has a brief but interesting introduction to the work of Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski - three academic political psychologists whose initial work sought to explain what they called "terror management theory." They hypothesized and confirmed that

the mere thought of one's mortality can trigger a range of emotions--from disdain for other races, religions, and nations, to a preference for charismatic over pragmatic leaders, to a heightened attraction to traditional mores.

An interesting beginning. And when you think about it, not much of a surprise: George Orwell was onto this stuff a half-century ago. We continue along the path of their discoveries:

To test the hypothesis that recognition of mortality evokes "worldview defense"--their term for the range of emotions, from intolerance to religiosity to a preference for law and order, that they believe thoughts of death can trigger--they assembled 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but, for one group, they inserted in the middle of the personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke awareness of their mortality. One asked the judges to "briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you"; the other required them to "jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead." They then asked the judges to set bail in the hypothetical case of a prostitute whom the prosecutor claimed was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises set an average bail of $455. The control group that did not do the exercises set it at an average of $50.

Over the next decade, the three performed similar experiments to illustrate how awareness of death could provoke worldview defense. They showed that what they now called "mortality salience" affected people's view of other races, religions, and nations.

But the three had yet another important discovery ahead of them:

Drawing on psychoanalysis, but looking for experimental verification, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski developed a theory to explain how mortality salience works. When they started conducting experiments, the psychologists had believed that the sheer recognition of one's mortality directly triggered worldview defense. But, when other psychologists, varying the procedure, failed to reproduce the same results, they discovered an important caveat: When they would ask subjects to make judgments immediately following the mortality exercises, the exercises would have little effect. It was only when they interspersed a diversionary interval between the exercises and the judgments that the exercises had their full impact.

Freud had distinguished between "primary processes" of thought that were unconscious and irrational and "secondary processes" that were conscious and rational. Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski reasoned that, when individuals first feel anxiety about their mortality, they respond consciously by invoking the usual psychological defenses-- for instance, telling themselves that "it's not me, now." That allayed conscious anxiety, but, after the conscious anxiety about mortality had subsided, the thought remained unconscious and active and led people to erect worldview defenses. "The implicit knowledge of death rather than the current focal awareness is the motivating factor," they wrote. "Once the problem of death is out of focal attention but while it is still highly accessible, terror management concerns are addressed by ... bolstering faith in the worldview."

To demonstrate this effect, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski devised experiments using subliminal cues. They asked subjects to evaluate whether two words on a computer screen were related. One group of subjects had the word "death" flashed subliminally between the two words, while another group had the word "field" flashed. Afterward, neither group said they saw more than two words at a time. But, by using word-fragment completion tests--for instance, is "coff_ _" completed as "coffin" or "coffee"?--the psychologists were able to establish that the group which had "death" flashed before them, but not the control group, was unconsciously thinking about death. The psychologists then asked the groups to evaluate essays critical and supportive of the United States. Those who had "death" flashed before them had a much more negative view of the essay critical of the United States than those who had seen the word "field." They exhibited the same pattern of judgment as those who had done the mortality exercises but, unlike them, did not need an interval before making judgments. The psychologists still lacked a full explanation of how this worked, but they had shown that, in their words, "worldview defense in response to thoughts of death does not require any conscious awareness of such thoughts." Indeed, it worked best when these thoughts were unconscious.

Aha.

Or rather:

Uh oh.

[cross-posted at Vernon Lee]

Creating Their Own Reality

On the heels of Conservapedia now comes QubeTV, the conservative YouTube. Apparently watching videos has a well-known liberal bias.

I've got an idea, why don't they just take over a little chunk of Alabama and call it "Conservamerica," because their prospects in this actual country are remote:

President Bush's unpopularity and a string of political setbacks have created a toxic climate for the Republican Party, making it harder to raise money and recruit candidates for its drive to retake control of Congress.

Some of the GOP's top choices to run for the House next year have declined, citing what Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) called a "poisonous" environment. And Republicans' fundraising edge, an important advantage over the last five years, has dwindled.

With GOP clout diminished after November's election losses, the Republicans' national committee and their House and Senate campaign committees together raised the same amount as the Democrats in the first quarter of the year — and Democrats ended the period with more cash in the bank. At this point four years ago, Republicans had more than twice the money Democrats did.

"The reality is the Republican brand right now is just not a good brand," said Tim Hibbitts, an independent Oregon pollster. "For Republicans, the only way things really get better … is if somehow, some way, Iraq turns around."

Considering there's been no discernable change in strategy; considering that even the "good news" from Al-Anbar is nothing more than proof that Iraqis want foreign elements out of their country, including the US; considering that the Iraqi security forces have little training and less money; considering that leader of the Iraqi government is pursuing a shadowy, theocratic, Shiite sectarian agenda by using a secret office to override Interior and Defense Ministry dictates;

Well, good luck with "Iraq turning around."

And it's clear to anyone who's not a rabidly partisan Bush defender that this is the case, that the failure in Iraq will cost the GOP dearly for decades to come. Bob Novak is publicly predicting a loss of GOP seats in 2008, which would be unprecedented after such a big victory like 2006. And David Brooks sees blood in the water as well.

On Capitol Hill, there is a strange passivity in Republican ranks. Republicans are privately disgusted with how President Bush has led their party and the nation, but they don’t publicly offer any alternatives. They just follow sullenly along. They privately believe the country needs new approaches to the war against Islamic extremism, but they don’t offer them. They try to block Democratic initiatives, but they don’t offer the country any new ways to think about the G.O.P. They are like people quietly marching to their doom.

And at the presidential level, things are even worse. The party is blessed with a series of charismatic candidates who are not orthodox Republicans. But the pressures of the campaign are such that these candidates have had to repress anything that might make them interesting. Instead of offering something new, each of them has been going around pretending to be the second coming of George Allen — a bland, orthodox candidate who will not challenge any of the party’s customs or prejudices.

To Brooks, who is right in this column, the fealty to various conservative interests has put the party into gridlock, unable to reverse course on Iraq or anything else. And none so less a leading conservative light as William F. Buckley had this to say:

The political problem of the Bush administration is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue. The opinion polls are savagely decisive on the Iraq question. About 60 percent of Americans wish the war ended — wish at least a timetable for orderly withdrawal. What is going on in Congress is in the nature of accompaniment. The vote in Congress is simply another salient in the war against war in Iraq. Republican forces, with a couple of exceptions, held fast against the Democrats’ attempt to force Bush out of Iraq even if it required fiddling with the Constitution. President Bush will of course veto the bill, but its impact is critically important in the consolidation of public opinion. It can now accurately be said that the legislature, which writes the people’s laws, opposes the war [...]

It is simply untrue that we are making decisive progress in Iraq. The indicators rise and fall from day to day, week to week, month to month. In South Vietnam there was an organized enemy. There is clearly organization in the strikes by the terrorists against our forces and against the civil government in Iraq, but whereas in Vietnam we had Hanoi as the operative headquarters of the enemy, we have no equivalent of that in Iraq, and that is a matter of paralyzing importance. All those bombings, explosions, assassinations: we are driven to believe that they are, so to speak, spontaneous.

When the Romans were challenged by Christianity, Rome fell. The generation of Christians moved by their faith overwhelmed the regimented reserves of the Roman state. It was four years ago that Mr. Cheney first observed that there was a real fear that each fallen terrorist leads to the materialization of another terrorist. What can a “surge,” of the kind we are now relying upon, do to cope with endemic disease? The parallel even comes to mind of the eventual collapse of Prohibition, because there wasn’t any way the government could neutralize the appetite for alcohol, or the resourcefulness of the freeman in acquiring it.

General Petraeus is a wonderfully commanding figure. But if the enemy is in the nature of a disease, he cannot win against it. Students of politics ask then the derivative question: How can the Republican party, headed by a president determined on a war he can’t see an end to, attract the support of a majority of the voters? General Petraeus, in his Pentagon briefing on April 26, reported persuasively that there has been progress, but cautioned, “I want to be very clear that there is vastly more work to be done across the board and in many areas, and again I note that we are really just getting started with the new effort.”

The general makes it a point to steer away from the political implications of the struggle, but this cannot be done in the wider arena. There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma.

The need to create a new reality is so great for Republicans because the current reality is so bleak. They can say that the election of 2006 proved that the middle is ascendant, and that Democrats are taking extremist positions, but honestly their heart doesn't even seem in it anymore. Republicans used to thrive in the minority but now they are just sad figures, marking time until they are completely out of
power.

UPDATE: This reminds me, I should get my tickets for the Failure of Conservatism Conference. Maybe in an alternate universe some Bush defenders will put together a "Failure of the Party that Just Won Power in the Congress" conference.