What the Heclo?

Shorter David Brooks:

I am big. It's Obama that got small.

Gloria Swanson. Photograph: Cine Text / Allstar/Sportsphoto Ltd. / Allstar.

Three paragraphs of Obama's 2009 inauguration speech, as if it was the most inspiring moment of Brooks's bleak life. Remember the column he wrote after hearing it, teardrops splashing on the Blackberry? Me neither. Actually, the first column he wrote after the inauguration was about

a neglected book that came out last summer called “On Thinking Institutionally” by the political scientist Hugh Heclo.

In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft.

Each of these institutions comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do. Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover. Scientists have obligations to the community of researchers. In the process of absorbing the rules of the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are.*

So it took him almost four years to achieve an adequate mental distance from that speech. That's understandable.

*He did, to be fair, refer to the inauguration before he saw it, in the column that ran that day, a Tuesday, then took the Friday off, presumably overwhelmed, or immersed in studying Dr. Heclo. In the next Friday column he resurfaced as Wonky Brooks, sticking his head between the jaws of policy, with Larry Summers and the stimulus:

As readers may know, the policy I am most passionate about is pre-K education. Yet I fervently hope that the Head Start expansion is dropped from this bill. A slapdash and shambolic expansion could discredit the whole idea.

Photograph by Vincent Bousserez. From Leonore in Art.

Then, three paragraphs on the president's virtues: integrity and prudence, which are "no small thing". So what is the small thing? Obama himself—"Honey, we shrank the President!"

The "scope of Obama’s vision" has been contracting politically, in the sense that where he used to bring Republicans and independents into the conversation, now he relies completely on his fellow Democrats and their worn, conventional ideas.** It has contracted managerially, in that the Big Guys with Big Voices of his original cabinet have dwindled into a bunch of Little Guys, apparently, with soft voices to match.*** It has contracted in mood (does the scope of a vision have a mood?):

The atmosphere of expansive hope has often given way to a mood of aggrieved annoyance. He seems cagier, more hemmed in by the perceived limitations of his office. The man who ran on hope four years ago is now running one of the most negative campaigns in history, aimed at disqualifying his opponent.****

But most of all it has contracted in vision (does the scope of a vision have a vision?):

If Obama had governed in a way truer to his inauguration, he would have used this winter of recuperation to address the country’s structural weaknesses. He would have said: Look, we’re not going to have booming growth soon, but we will use this period to lay the groundwork for a generation of prosperity — with plans to reform the tax code, get our long-term entitlement burdens under control, get our political system working, shift government resources from the affluent elderly to struggling young families and future growth.

Fuck yeah! Why didn't he address those structural weaknesses? Why does it always have to be infrastructural weaknesses with him? Why won't he plan to reform the tax code? Why hasn't he gotten our long-term entitlement burdens under control? Why doesn't he tell those Koch brothers and the like that he wants to shift the tax expenditures from them to struggling young families and future growth?

Oh, wait. The Koch brothers aren't the affluent elderly. The affluent elderly are your mom and dad, living on Social Security checks in Cheektowaga. Suck it up, Mom and Dad! Everybody needs to sacrifice! If you were 20 years younger, Paul Ryan would be putting you on a health care voucher plan, so shut those pieholes and get back to work!

Instead of taking the midterm defeat as a sign he should move to the center, or confound the political categories, he seems to have hunkered down and become more political. Washington dysfunction now looks worse than ever.

Hey, Brooksie, you want to know why Obama didn't move to the center? Because he couldn't find it, that's why! He's been looking as hard as he can, but the Republicans took the center and buried it, in the swamps of Kulyagash! The center is somewhere in East Tatarstan, we'll never see it again. And you know whose fault that is? It's yours, you dim twit, you editorial voguer, you irredentist right-wing whore in the guise of a fourth-rate Nebraska management professor, you smooth-tongued buffoon, you private-school crybaby bully of the plebeians, you.... Oh, never mind. See you Tuesday, when I fully expect you to come back and confess that Obama is the paragon of Burkean modesty, gradual revolution, and gentlemanliness that you've always longed for.

**Actually, as we now know, they used to be Republican ideas, only the Republicans abandoned them as they scattered from the field, like the Russian army fleeing Napoleon, drawing the Legions into the immensity of the steppes. "Look!" said Obama, "Intellectual provender!" "Don't touch it!" cried Marshall Ney, but he was too late...

***I'm not sure who he might be thinking of here, other than Larry Summers, and conceivably the late Richard Holbrooke. Does he miss Austan Goolsbee? (I do!) Rahm Emanuel? (Not!) Elizabeth Warren?? Most of the folks that Brooks agrees with, Geithner, Duncan, Petraeus, are still around, aren't they?

****Really, more negative than the campaigns of Atwater and Rove? How did he manage that? And why do you suppose he might feel "aggrieved" or complain about "perceived limitations"? Must be because he doesn't have his own estate, with brush to clear—wants to do nothing but sit around signing bills all day.