Going too harsh on Brooks

I like David Brooks a lot. Sometimes he writes stuff of such intelligence that he really stuns you with his insights.

A bit back, I penned (yet again) another harsh take on one of his columns, reflecting my tendency to either love or hate his work recently, especially on the subject of Obama.

Now, it's clear Brooks wants McCain and wants him bad, and that, after a brief flirtation with Obama in the primaries, he's written several pieces that--in my mind--concentrate on his fakeness as a human and thus his being too weird to be a leader.

I did tee off on the piece below, and too harshly at that.

You can almost track the onsets of my sinus infections by the nasty posts I write, and this was definitely one of them. I try to watch that when I know I'm not feeling great, but it happens and I do apologize for the tone, especially after yesterday's post on comment decorum.

Ouch!

So the comments on that post were correct to call me on my tone.

What I read in the op-ed was yet another attempt by a McCain supporter to go after Obama's coolness as a sign that he's creepily detached from the real world. To the extent people found this piece positive, I think they're missing what I see as a left-handed compliment or damning with faint praise.

Brooks has written a number of pieces about Obama in this vein. I see it as a very purposeful campaign that displays his lack of objectivity on the subject, but then again, this is a close campaign, so I should watch my mouth as well.

Comments

[large]

Damn! You ARE human! heh, heh . . .

[Anonymous]

large: something i appreciate about Tom is that he's willing to listen to criticism and admit when he's wrong. not that he thinks he's wrong too often... ;-)

[Tom Barnett]

I never think I'm wrong! (even as I sometimes discover I am). I do admit to bad behavior quite frequently.

[William R. Cumming]

Brooks is no SAFIRE! No more need be said.

[Kurt Waltzer]

Admitting an over-reaction is a good and important thing to do in world that desperately needs people to act like grown ups in public.

As an Obama supporter though, I did have a different take on the article. Brooks was noting something that I've thought for some time. Namely that Obama may have a quality that existed in other great presidents - the ability to separate his own ego from the presidency. Lincoln personified this by the way he was willing to humiliate himself in oder to get McClellan to fight. FDR and Regan had this same quality. Not that they didn't have big egos, but that their egos weren't inseparable from the job - like W. Clinton, Nixon, Johnson, etc.

[truthteller]

Did he ever offer an olive branch to Bill Lind?

[Christopher Thompson]

I wouldn't back off on that Brooks article too far. And I agree that some of Brooks' articles are very insightful. He has a zone where he is a thinker worthy of the NY Times op ed page, though I am not sure I have ever been able to define the boundaries of that zone.

But the article you reacted to is the other Brooks. This Brooks comes up with a little theory, here it is that Obama will be a dud because of personality defects, and then sets out to argue his point. The problem is always his tortured nexus of allegations that he props up as facts to build his case. If any one of these facts is less than true then the whole argument starts to seem like nonsense. Worse, some are just observations condensed into supposed facts.

We have Obama never displaying any emotion. We have the two motivations of politicians. We have the claim that Obama has relationship X to audiences. Or that Obama has outlook Y -- different that FDR or Reagan. Maybe Obama is this bad thing. Perhaps he is that bad thing. Good grief!

There are genuine areas to be concerned about how Obama might perform as president, and those should be written about in depth. But this article is the irrelevant and unprovable chasing its tail. I think your first reaction was closer to the mark.

[ShrinkWrapped]

Just as you shouldn't be surprised that Brooks displays his lack of objectivity, don't be surprised that your objectvity (just as mine and everyone else's) is colored by (y)our biases. The core idea of Post-modernism, that our biases distort our perceptions, is certainly true; unfortunately, the superficial understanding of PoMo common to the parochial cognoscenti, has led to all kinds of problems, but that is not germane to this post.

[Anonymous]

Bill Lind didn't deserve an olive branch. he's the one who went off the rails. Tom just called it.

SW: interesting PoMo commentary. the PoMo critique is true and devastating. but it doesn't leave much content to work with...

[Tom Mull]

Jurgen Habermas is a good antidote to the PoMo. He took Derrida to task! =)

[Matt Osborne]

What I like about Brooks is that we can watch him change his mind over time; his columns really need to be read in a collected format to appreciate the style, which is almost stream-of-consciousness writing when taken as a whole. We'll see his opinion develop over the next four years, and I have no doubt it will make interesting reading.