Brooks discovers Barack

Art from an essay by Steven Hayward from 2010 that opens up, "With the stunning victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts it appears the long night of the soul for conservatives may be over. The last two years have been tough for the Right. In terms of political power, conservatism is at its lowest point in more than 30 years..."

Verbatim David Brooks, "I Miss Barack Obama", New York Times, February 9 2016:

As this primary season has gone along, a strange sensation has come over me: I miss Barack Obama.

Well, that is a pretty strange sensation. Because he didn't go anywhere yet, you know? If you'd like to see him, he's still around. He's the president of the United States. He just sent a new budget up the Hill this morning, for Pete's sake, though the Republicans up there are doing their best to pretend it doesn't exist:

In a harsh partisan snub, the Republican chairmen of the Senate and House budget committees — Senator Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming and Representative Tom Price of Georgia — have chosen not to invite Shaun Donovan, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to testify about the administration’s plan, set to be released on Tuesday as part of the traditional budget week festivities.

Even though Obama is wrong about stuff, in Brooks's humble opinion, he has a good character, on five main parameters: basic integrity, basic humanity, soundness in his decision-making process, grace under pressure, and a resilient sense of optimism (I wonder what a sense of optimism is, like you can smell it when it's in the room? and what it is when it's not resilient, but let that pass). It's noteworthy, as Driftglass cheerfully points out, that Brooks has not always had such a high opinion of the president, but maybe he was only dreaming then, or maybe he's only dreaming now, does it make a difference?

Whereas each of these characteristics is missing for one or more of the current crop of presidential candidates, like Clinton must lack basic integrity, since she is frequently forced to hold defensive press conferences, which is not something you'd expect to happen to a decent person. Unless it's Obama holding a press conference on Syria, last November, say, when somebody like David Brooks might want to criticize it:

And so for him to talk self-righteously about other people and their response to the Syrian refugee — he bears some responsibility for the Syrian refugee crisis.

But perhaps that happened in the dream world too.

(Seriously, every national-scale press conference involving sports, popular entertainment, or Democrats is defensive nowadays, with the dolts of the dying media desperate to show how tough and relevant they are; that's why Obama doesn't like holding them, which is in turn why David Brooks forgets that he has held any at all.)

Also Clinton and Christie are surrounded by "unsightly" characters, while I guess all of Obama's staffers are good-looking? No, he meant to pick up "unsavory" but was blinded by his tears. Any adjective in a storm, as they say.

Donald Trump lacks the sense of basic humanity (the word "basic" comes up five times in the column), as does Cruz; while we'd be glad to see the Obamas on the boards of our favorite charities, we might not be so comfortable with Cruz (that's an extraordinary example—does he think Cruz looks like a potential embezzler? I do, of course, but that's another matter). Sanders lacks judgmental soundness, being unable to grasp the reality of a situation, and Rubio is short on grace under pressure, though he's totes adorbs about it ("charming" is the Brooksian word). Sanders, Trump, Cruz, and Carson don't show optimism, but make us "wallow in the pornography of pessimism", which sounds pretty dire. Actually I think Brooks may have some confusion as to what "optimism" means. Trump, and especially Sanders, are incredibly optimistic; Sanders thinks he can bring no-fee medical care and drugs and hospitalization and college tuition to our entire population, break the five biggest banks into tiny harmless pieces, and make the Koch brothers pay their fair share of the tax burden by the simple expedient of getting people to vote for him!

What Trump with his crude invective, and Sanders with his furious eloquence, and Clinton with her statistics too are doing isn't pessimism, it's criticism; they are complaining that we need change. And asserting, as Obama has always done, that change associated with hope can be attained. That's optimism, the belief that we can make progress.

Pessimism, in contrast, is the view that change for the better doesn't happen, things just get worse, progress in some areas has dreadful unforeseen consequences in others and it's best not to mess with things too much; try to stabilize the situation as well as you can, but don't go too far, and don't expect much. Pessimism, in fact, is the basis of the conservatism developed by Edmund Burke against liberal optimists like Adam Smith and David Hume in the 1790s, or articulated in such memorable language by William F. Buckley ("standing athwart history yelling 'stop'") or memorizable language by young Marco (intoning, in that high-pitched, terrified voice, "Barack Obama knows exactly what he is doing; he wants to change America!!!!"). It's the philosophical view David Brooks has been peddling for the past 30 years.

I can't understand why he doesn't know that (I blame the upside-down optimism of Reagan, I suppose, whose essentially Daoist conservatism claimed that government could create a paradise on earth by not doing anything other than conquering this and that available little country, but Burke would have thought that Reagan was a complete fool, and Buckley knew he was).

Another question I'll just drop here is: Obama emerges in Brooks's panegyric as the kind of person, with his ethical stature and cool reason and the way he

radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance

("radiates" again!), who really ought to be right about everything. As in his other studies of the heroes of character, from George Eliot through Dorothy Day and Frances Perkins to Bayard Rustin, he's somebody of pronounced liberal or progressive opinions, views diametrically opposed to those that Brooks espouses. Does he ever ever wonder if these people he regards as smart, kind, spiritually blessed, radiant could be right and he could be wrong?