Profile of a Useful Idiot

TNR has a profile of Barack Obama's favorite conservative pundit, David Brooks. The thing to know about Brooks is that he's a nearly man. He wanted to be an Ivy League scholar, but had to settle for the University of Chicago. He wanted to be a hardnosed political reporter but ended up a more sedate political commentator instead. He spent his life like a sort of Dickensian figure with his nose pressed against the window, studying the lives of the people he wanted to be. People like David Axelrod:

whose career Brooks kept a close eye on after he graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983 and took a job at the City News Bureau, a Chicago wire service. At the time, Axelrod was the lead City Hall reporter for the Chicago Tribune. “I followed his career because he was who I wanted to be,” Brooks told me. “He was a hero.”

And of course Brooks' biggest intellectual hero, Barack Obama, who was just better than him in, well, everything:

as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of--we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”

He was right about the first part, though sadly not about the second. That doesn't stop him, of course, from singing Obama's praises at every opportunity. Even the leftwing TNR has noticed that Brooks seems to be taking this cheerleader-in-chief thing a bit too seriously:

These days, the center-right Brooks frequently seems more sympathetic toward Obama than the liberal Paul Krugman. He has written columns praising Obama’s Afghanistan policy, education proposals, and economic team. Even on broad areas of disagreement--deficit spending, the sprawling stimulus bill, health care reform--Brooks tends to treat Obama and his administration with respect. “My overall view,” Brooks told me, “is ninety-five percent of the decisions they make are good and intelligent. Whether I agree with them specifically, I think they’re very serious and very good at what they do.” It is an odd situation to say the least: David Brooks, prominent conservative, has become the most visible journalistic ally of arguably the most liberal president of his lifetime.

Naturally, the White House goes out of its way to cultivate this useful idiot. As the article's author Gabriel Sherman explains, this is all part of a simple political calculation:

Brooks’s sympathetic columns help to validate the key myth of this White House: that it is fundamentally post-partisan. Plus, Brooks appeals to a major Obama constituency: the latté-sipping Baby Boomers who were the subject of his 2000 best-seller Bobos in Paradise. These were among Obama’s strongest supporters in the last election, but their loyalty could be tested by spiraling deficits, botched health care reform, or a flagging economy. As much as any columnist, Brooks speaks to these left-of-center suburbanites.

If Brooks is aware of the fact he's being used, he doesn't seem to care. And why should he? After all, the same people whose lives he used to study through a glass darkly are suddenly interested in... him! Plain old David Brooks! All of a sudden, he is allowed to say 'us' when he talks about these people, as in:

“I divide people into people who talk like us and who don’t talk like us,” he explains. “Of recent presidents, Clinton could sort of talk like us, but Obama is definitely--you could see him as a New Republic writer. He can do the jurisprudence, he can do the political philosophy, and he can do the politics. I think he’s more talented than anyone in my lifetime. I mean, he is pretty dazzling when he walks into a room.

Sadly his elevation to 'we' status has come at a cost: "I do wish more people walked up to me and said, ‘I’m a conservative and I love you.’." But unfortunately, that hardly ever happens. Strange, no?