As far as he's concerned

Concerned Greta Garbo. From Mauritz Stiller's Gösta Berlings Saga, 1924, via Lamb & Serpent.

Verbatim David Brooks, "The Mobilization Error", June 9 2015:

Democratic and Republican presidential candidates face a choice: They can appeal to the broadest possible audience or pander to their most devoted partisans. Most will choose option No. 2, because it's the easiest and clearest route to the presidency.

But it's not the right path.

Hahaha, fooled you, it's Ron Fournier! But I'm not sure you could corroborate that in a blind tasting. There are some formal differences keyed to the fact that one is a blog post, the other a dead-tree column: Fournier uses a lot more blockquotes (with bonus blockquote from CHUCK TODD!) and links, Brooks trots out more "arguments" (first, second, third, finally, and furthermore), but they agree, Hillary Clinton is not doing enough to unify the nation and it's time for concerned well-wishers to get really frowny.

Both are responses to what Erik Loomis has called "The Worst Article of the 2016 Election Cycle", last Saturday's lament in the Times by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman over the Clinton campaign's apparent decision to write off 40 states such as West Virginia and North Dakota, and white men, dropping the 50-state strategy even though, you know, they haven't, and even though Martin and Haberman themselves appear to have heard about that, wandering away toward the end of their long piece from its thesis to its antithesis:

Mrs. Clinton’s strategic intentions are also evident in her focus on organizing. Mr. Mook noted twice in an interview that her campaign already had supporters in all 50 states mustering volunteers to register voters and ensure Mrs. Clinton is on the ballot. 

No, the real problem is the one they get to well before that, in paragraph 19:

she is embracing the central lesson of the Obama school: that voters turn out when they believe that an election makes a difference and that their party’s standard-bearer is a champion on issues important to them.

By emphatically staking out liberal positions on gay rights, immigration, criminal justice, voting rights and pay equity for women, Mrs. Clinton is showing core Democratic constituencies that she intends to give them a reason to support her.

It's in taking those radical leftist views on gay rights (marriage equality supported by 61% of the population and rising), immigration (reform with a path to citizenship backed by 77%), criminal justice (sentencing reform uniting the Center for American Progress and the Koch brothers) that Clinton shows she just doesn't care what undecided independents like, um, Ron Fournier and David Brooks think.

Or as Brooks himself puts it,

Clinton strategists have decided that, even in the general election, firing up certain Democratic supporters is easier than persuading moderates. Clinton will adopt left-leaning policy positions carefully designed to energize the Obama coalition — African-Americans, Latinos, single women and highly educated progressives.

Yes, her ongoing activities have nothing to do with the primary campaign but are all about the general a little more than a year away.

And what's wrong with it?

This strategy is bad, first, for the country. America has always had tough partisan politics, but for most of its history, the system worked because it had leaders who could reframe debates, reorganize coalitions, build center-out alliances and reach compromises. Politics is broken today because those sorts of leaders have been replaced by highly polarizing, base-mobilizing politicians who hew to party orthodoxy, ignore the 38 percent of voters who identify as moderates and exacerbate partisanship and gridlock

I know, I remember how Franklin Delano "I Welcome Their Hatred" Roosevelt refused to be tempted into petty partisanship. Some wag at LGM noted that Lincoln literally unified the country, but only by prosecuting and winning a war against half of it, which he might not have needed to do if the other guys had hewed a little less to the party line. That hewing will get you every time. Or as Louise Sklaroff of Philadelphia once wrote to the late William Safire,

Second, this base mobilization strategy is a legislative disaster. If the next president hopes to pass any actual laws, he or she will have to create a bipartisan governing majority. That means building a center-out coalition, winning 60 reliable supporters in the Senate and some sort of majority in the House.

Worked so well for Obama. That old Congress was passing so many laws they had to rent space to find places to keep them all.

Third, the mobilization strategy corrodes every candidate’s leadership image. Voters tend to like politicians who lead from a place of conviction, who care more about a cause than winning a demographic.

If Hillary talked about causes she really cared about she'd be pushing the causes you and Fournier like? This assumption that there's no difference between her actual convictions and Jeb Bush's is the reason people like you shouldn't be writing about politics, because you wouldn't recognize a conviction if it snuck into your bed at night and bit you in the ear. A totally foreign concept.

Finally, the base mobilizing strategy isn’t even very good politics.... If Clinton comes across as a stereotypical big-spending, big-government Democrat, she will pay a huge cost in the Upper Midwest and the Sun Belt.

And as North Dakota goes, so goes Nebraska. She's playing with fire here. And you do so hope she doesn't make any political mistakes, don't you? Just showing some of that kind-hearted, ah, concern? Oh, and the "furthermore" was urging her not to neglect the imaginary swing voters, but I think we've really heard enough about them until it's next year.

Update: Driftglass flags a hilarious interview of our Brooksy by Newsweek's Robert Chalmers, who is taking some extraordinary mickey out of the humilist sage. Twice. On today's idiocy, see Nancy Le Tourneau. The Rude One offers some invaluable Rudeness, and Steve M is unafraid to ask the tough questions, like how come Republicans don't have to do all this center-outing compromise? In what universe is J.E.B. Bush a unitificatory moderate bringing us all together as he builds his center-out coalition?

And Brooks hits his 115th use of the word "amazing":

Today’s political consultants have a lot of great tools to turn out reliable voters. They’re capable of creating amazing power points.

Powerpoints turn out voters? I note there are also 17 instances in the record of the adverb version, "amazingly".

For once I didn't check out one of his unsourced numbers:

"but according to the Pew Research Center, 24 percent of voters have a roughly equal number of conservative and liberal positions, and according to a range of academic studies, about 23 percent of the electorate can be swayed by a compelling campaign."

Luckily, Philip Bump did, and it turns out to have been pulled out of his ass. This via Driftglass, whose own take, as always, is obligatory.