Late Monday Smackdown: David Brooks of the New York Times Says: I Have Been Bullshitting All of You About Obama for the Last Eight Years

Let’s not forget the kinds of things David Brooks was writing about Barack Obama four years ago:

• “Why isn’t Barack Obama doing better?… Why is he basically tied with his opponent when his party is so far ahead?… The root of it:… Obama has been a sojourner…. He put one foot in the institutions he rose through on his journey but never fully engaged… in the law school, but not of it. This has been a consistent pattern throughout his odyssey…. When we’re judging candidates (or friends), we… judge them by the connections that exist beyond choice and the ground where they will go home to be laid to rest…. It is hard to plant Obama…. This should be a Democratic wipeout. But voters seem to be slow to trust a sojourner they cannot place.”
• : “John McCain… will never get as many cheers in Germany as Barack Obama, but for a century his family has embodied American heroism. He will never seem as young and forward-leaning as his opponent, but he did have his values formed in an age that people now look back to with respect…. If McCain is going to win… it will because he can communicate an essential truth — that people in a great and successful nation do not want change for its own sake… [but] only… careful reform…”
• Big Government Ahead: “What we’re going to see, in short, is the Gingrich revolution in reverse and on steroids. There will be a big increase in spending and deficits. In normal times, moderates could have restrained the zeal on the left. In an economic crisis, not a chance. The over-reach is coming. The backlash is next.”
• “Barack Obama for two years…there hasn’t been a moment in which he has publicly lost his self-control… displayed rage, resentment, fear, anxiety, bitterness, tears, ecstasy, self-pity or impulsiveness…. It’s also easy to imagine a scenario in which he is not an island of rationality in a sea of tumult, but simply an island… an observer, not a leader… stand[ing] back. Congressional leaders, put off by his supposed intellectual superiority, will just go their own way. Lost in his own nuance, he will be passive and ineffectual. Lack of passion will produce lack of courage. The Obama greatness will give way to the Obama anti-climax. We can each guess how the story ends…”
• Playing Innocent Abroad: “The golden rhetoric impresses less, the evasion of hard choices strikes one more…. The speech fed the illusion that we could solve our problems if only people mystically come together…. The great illusion of the 1990s was that we were entering an era of global convergence in which politics and power didn’t matter. What Obama offered in Berlin flowed right out of this mind-set. This was the end of history on acid…. Substantively, optimism without reality isn’t eloquence. It’s just Disney.”
• : “Barack Obama succeeded by running a weird campaign…. But by campaigning in this traditional way, Obama ceded the weirdness edge to McCain. The old warrior jumped right in…. And it all worked. McCain got a huge postconvention bounce in the polls…. The maverick theme allows McCain to talk directly about character. Obama can hint at his values when he describes his tax cuts and health care plans, but he is indirect. Most voters, especially ones who decide late, vote on character over policies. If I were advising the candidates, I’d tell them to double down on weirdness. Obama needs to occasionally criticize his own side. If he can’t take on his own party hacks, he’ll never reclaim the mantle of systemic change. Specifically, he needs to attack the snobs who are savaging Sarah Palin’s faith and family…”
• “Barack Obama’s polling lead has evaporated…. All the Santa Monica Machiavellis emerge from their fund-raisers offering words of wisdom… that Barack Obama should really be someone else…. Obama is already an elusive Rorschach test candidate, and now he’s being pulled by his party in a thousand directions…. Large numbers of voters still don’t know who he is…. And now he has to define himself amid the phantasmagorical vapors of his own party: the ghosts of the Kerry campaign, the overshadowing magic of the Kennedys and the ego-opera that perpetually surrounds the Clintons…. Obama may yet recover his core focus. Now he has to preserve it against his most terrifying foes: the ‘experts’ in his own party.”
• A Speech to the Delegates: “Barack Obama loves the future because that’s where all his accomplishments are…. We are all one country and one American family, whether we are caring and thoughtful Democrats or hate-filled and war-crazed Republicans. We must bring together left and right, marinara and carbonara, John and Elizabeth Edwards. On United we stand, on US Airways, there’s a 25-minute delay…. My great-grandfather fought in Patton’s Army, along with Barack Obama’s great-grand uncles’ fourth cousin once removed…. We got to know Barack and Michelle Obama, two tall, thin, rich, beautiful people who don’t perspire, but who nonetheless feel compassion for their squatter and smellier fellow citizens. We know that Barack could have gone to a prestigious law firm, like his big donors in the luxury boxes, but he chose to put his ego aside to become a professional politician, president of the United States and redeemer of the human race. We heard about his time as a community organizer, the three most fulfilling months of his life…. This country cannot afford to elect John Bushmccain. Under Republican rule, locusts have stripped the land, adults wear crocs in public and M&M’s have lost their flavor. We must instead ride to the uplands of hope! For as Barack Obama suggested Thursday night, wherever there is a president who needs to tap our natural-gas reserves, I’ll be there. Wherever there is a need for a capital-gains readjustment for targeted small businesses, I’ll be there. Wherever there is a president committed to direct diplomacy with nuclear proliferators, I’ll be there, too! God bless the Democrats, and God Bless America!”

Originally published on bradford-delong.com