Once, David Brooks liked Obama (he sounds almost like Andrew Sullivan in this first passage):
Obama emphasizes the connections between people, the networks and the webs of influence. These sorts of links are invisible to some of his rivals, but Obama is a communitarian. He believes you can only make profound political changes if you first change the spirit of the community. In his speeches, he says that if one person stands up, then another will stand up and another and another and you’ll get a nation standing up.
The key word in any Obama speech is “you.” Other politicians talk about what they will do if elected. Obama talks about what you can do if you join together. Like a community organizer on a national scale, he is trying to move people beyond their cynicism, make them believe in themselves, mobilize their common energies.
Later, he started getting concerned; one could almost see Brooks’s furled brow:
In short, a candidate should never betray the core theory of his campaign, or head down a road that leads to that betrayal. Barack Obama doesn’t have an impressive record of experience or a unique policy profile. New politics is all he’s got. He loses that, and he loses everything. Every day that he looks conventional is a bad day for him.
Besides, the real softness of the campaign is not that Obama is a wimp. It’s that he has never explained how this new politics would actually produce bread-and-butter benefits to people in places like Youngstown and Altoona.
If he can’t explain that, he’s going to lose at some point anyway.
Today, Brooks is thoroughly disillusioned:
But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.
This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.
But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.
For what it’s worth, I think that after liking Obama too much, Brooks has gone overboard and is now fearing Obama too much. If Obama was so brainy, he would have left Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko behind years ago. My own contribution to the field of Obamology is that he has no core identity, so he adjusts to each environment—Hawaii, Harvard, Chicago, Washington—as he needs to. It’s oversimplifying to say he’s a phony, which is the term my Jerry Brown loving mother gave him, but it does have some truth to it. To borrow a phrase from the self-declared Ayatollah of the Assembly, Willie Brown, Obama has “ice water in his veins.”
And in the exhaustive and exhausting coverage that envelopes a modern presidential campaign, the chill in Obama won’t stay hid for long. Remember his comments about voters being bitter? There’s a certain chilly rationalism there, the heart of a political scientist rather than a person: I think that’s the real Obama speaking. Knowing what Obama’s really like leads to perhaps the only way for McCain to win the presidency.
If McCain can drown out the media narrative of him being ancient and cantankerous and Bush’s third term with his own warmth and humanity, then he’ll beat the cold Obama.
Posted by Hubbard in Audacity of Hype