Stop Beating Up on David Brooks

Writing a book is like any act of indecent exposure: You can enjoy doing it, but sooner or later, may be punished, as David Brooks is discovering.

A New York Times columnist and PBS commentator, Brooks is widely respected (including here), but "The Social Animal" is taking a pasting.

That's a risk if, like Brooks, you search for deeper meaning in the daily flood of news, particularly when you subtitle your book, "The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement."

What emerges, from promotional interviews and book reviews, is that he is using brain science and sociology to explain how "the deepest recesses of our minds should change the way we see ourselves, raise our kids, conduct business, teach, manage our relationships and practice politics...(W)e’re social animals. We emerge out of relationships and live to bond with each other and connect to larger ideas."

If Brooks has set himself a high bar, he is not getting points for that from critics across the board.

Embattled NPR calls it "messy. Midway through, its characters devolve from protagonists to mouthpieces who deliver prescriptions for culture, business and politics. On occasion, Brooks veers into satire, which muddies his intentions."

Rightward, Forbes headlines "A Scornful Review," while Salon labels it "David Brooks' dream world for the trust-fund set" and Slate sums up:

"To tell the story of the unconscious and its role in shaping our fate, Brooks invents a man and a woman, Harold and Erica. The two are like the Forrest Gumps of social science..."

Ouch. But a few words, however qualified, for the defense are in order. Brooks' book seems an updated and more sophisticated version of those best-sellers of the 1950s--"The Organization Man" and "The Hidden Persuaders"--which wowed the post-World War II generation with news that society is not always what it seems and there are unseen forces at work.

If Brooks is a little late and/or "muddled" in searching for the unconscious in 21st century lives, he deserves respect for trying to understand what has driven America into a segmented, selfish and hate-filled society.

He may not have all the answers but is asking some of the right questions, and a witness for the defense can cite one of his political gifts that should not be overlooked.

In October 2006, Brooks spotted the potential of an unknown politician in a column, "Run, Barack, Run." Now he has written "Run, Mitch, Run," urging Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels to go for it next year:

"He couldn’t match Obama in grace and elegance, but he could on substance. They could have a great and clarifying debate: What exactly are the paramount problems facing the country? What is government’s role in solving them?"

David Brooks deserves respect, however flawed his attempt at pseudo-novelistic deep think may be, as a journalist who is always asking the right questions. There aren't too many of them around.

A Republican Obama?

In 2006, conservative columnist David Brooks fell in love politically with a young senator and wrote a column, "Run Barack Run." We all know how that worked out and now, in a column today, "Meet John Thune," Brooks reveals a new heartthrob from the other side of the Senate aisle.

"Thune," he writes, "is the junior senator from South Dakota, the man who beat Tom Daschle in an epic campaign five years ago. The first thing everybody knows about him is that he is tall (6 feet 4 inches), tanned (in a prairie, sun-chapped sort of way) and handsome (John McCain jokes that if he had Thune’s face he’d be president right now). If you wanted a Republican with the same general body type and athletic grace as Barack Obama, you’d pick Thune."

So much for looks, although a Gary Cooper/Jimmy Stewart lookalike might visually be a better 2012 bet for the GOP than a stiff Mitt Romney or a pudding-faced Mike Huckabee.

But more than that, Brooks insists his new man is not ideologically scary, that "people like Thune offer Republicans a way to connect fiscal discipline with traditional small-town values, a way to tap into rising populism in a manner that is optimistic, uplifting and nice."

These days, few commentators are calling Barack Obama "nice," but it's cheering to remember when Brooks was saying about him: "He distrusts righteous anger and zeal. He does not demonize his opponents and tells audiences that he does not think George Bush is a bad man."

As a political casting director, Brooks has a record that deserves respect.

Senate's Supreme Soap Opera

As the Sotomayor Show drones on, Democrats and Republicans are pushing dueling plot lines--an American dream of minority upward mobility vs. the Conservative nightmare of activist judges tilting the scales in favor of it (see firemen, New Haven).

Behind these postures is the reality that Supreme Court confirmations are now TV soap operas in which politicians emote to their core constituencies on the way to what only Lindsey Graham openly acknowledges as Judge Sotomayor's predetermined final scene: "Unless you have a meltdown, you’re going to get confirmed.”

Without the high drama of Borking or Clarence Thomas High-Tech Lynching, this week's action will feature nitpicking over Wise Latina Woman and other off-the-bench remarks by the nominee, leaving the dutiful viewer to muse over the middle-aged woman at the center of it all.

Behind that figure of "a young minority woman from humble circumstances who overcomes obstacles, fights discrimination and achieves the American dream," David Brooks sees "a person who worked hard and contributes profoundly to society, but who also sacrificed things along the way"--in short, a personal life.

Brooks' concern for Sotomayor is touching, but it invites comparison with attitudes toward the Justice she is succeeding, David Souter, a quirky, reclusive New England bachelor who preferred mountain-climbing to Washington socializing.

No one clucked over Souter's "sacrifices," and after this week's ordeal is over, Sotomayor will take her seat as the third woman ever on the Supreme Court and, by the time her tenure ends, such sexist distinctions will be long gone.

Left, Right and Wrong on Health Care

If you doubt that liberal and conservative have lost all meaning in the health care debate, consult the New York Times' columnists of those persuasions.

On the left, Paul Krugman predicts reform "will be undermined by 'centrist' Democratic senators who either prevent the passage of a bill or insist on watering down key elements...

"What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out a bait-and-switch, replacing a true public option with something meaningless. For the record, neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs."

On the right, David Brooks insists: "We’ve built an entire health care system (maybe an entire government) on the illusion of something for nothing. Instead of tackling that basic logic, we’ve got a reform process that is trying to evade it."

Brooks argues for a plan by Democrat Ron Wyden and Republican Robert Bennett to repeal tax exemptions for insurance premiums and provide universal coverage. "The Wyden-Bennett bill has 14 bipartisan co-sponsors and the Congressional Budget Office has found that it would be revenue-neutral," he claims, but Senate Committee leaders of both parties are concentrating instead on "grand rhetoric and superficial cost containment."

The political hot air on Capitol Hill is filled with nonsense from both sides of the aisles, and so far the White House has been unwilling to make them stop the political blather and face reality.

Bush's Unleashed Dog Dilemmas

"And there I was, former president of the United States of America, with a plastic bag on my hand," George W. Bush told high-school students yesterday about having to clean up after his dog Barney relieved himself in a neighbor's yard.

When he shares a stage with Bill Clinton next week, will anyone in the audience ask Bush about the mess that his attack dog Cheney is making in Washington?

Compared to the former vice president, Barney is a model of loyalty, according to David Brooks in today's New York Times:

"When Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he’s not really attacking the Obama administration. He’s attacking the Bush administration. In his speech on Thursday, he repeated in public a lot of the same arguments he had been making within the Bush White House as the policy decisions went more and more the other way."

As Cheney goes rabid against the Obama Administration, Bush loyalists are anxious to point out the vice president's declining influence during their second term in the White House.

Writing about "The Cheney Fallacy," former White House Counsel Jack Goldsmith disputes his claims that Obama has reversed Bush policies and argues, "The Bush administration shot itself in the foot time and time again, to the detriment of the legitimacy and efficacy of its policies, by indifference to process and presentation."

More and more, the current brouhaha is looking not like Cheney vs. Obama, but Cheney vs. Bush and recalling the old saying, "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog."

But only as long as you can keep him on a leash.

Stealing Republican Thunder

"Obama is positioning the Democrats as the party of order, responsibility and small-town values," David Brooks writes in the New York Times today. "If he pulls this mantle away from the Republicans, it would be the greatest train robbery in American politics."

Where the conservative Brooks sees theft, the less ideological may find an expectable reaction to eight years of Bush lawlessness and loony laissez-faire. There is an indication of this in new Gallup figures on the relative mistrust of business and government

Historically, Americans have always been more wary of those who want political power than money. In handing out control of the then-limited capacity of radio and later television, for example, they set severe limits on the sales of ideas but practically none on peddling everything else.

That traditional mistrust of government power, Gallup reports, "expanded greatly in the 1990s--reaching a high of 65% in 1999 and 2000."

But Bush changed that: "In 2002, after the wave of accounting scandals at companies like Enron and WorldCom, opinions shifted, and the percentage mentioning big business as the greatest threat peaked at 38%, while concern about big government dipped below the majority level for the first time since 1981," then returned to normal "until the recent financial crisis caused more to fear the power of big business."

Now Americans, to Brooks' consternation, are putting their faith in big government to clean up the mess.

"Obama understands," he writes, "that this is primarily an authority crisis. A system Americans have trusted--the market--has failed in important ways. He has found a theme and bids to reassert authority. But he will seem like an impostor and a manipulator if he imposes responsibility on everybody but himself."

His worry is understandable, but there is no alternative to taking that risk. Obama is now the only game in town, and all the chips are on the table.

As John Bogle, a champion of capitalism who founded the Vanguard Funds, puts it in the Wall Street Journal:

"(S)elf-interest got out of hand. It created a bottom-line society in which success is measured in monetary terms. Dollars became the coin of the new realm. Unchecked market forces overwhelmed traditional standards of professional conduct, developed over centuries."

It will take a lot of brains and guts to get through what Bogle describes as "a crisis of ethic proportions," and most Americans will not be fussy about whether they are Democratic or Republican.

Memo to Rahm Emanuel

You've got it all wrong about Rush Limbaugh dictating Republican strategy. Actually it's David Brooks.

In his New York Times column this morning, Brooks writes: "The G.O.P. leaders have adopted a posture that allows the Democrats to make all the proposals while all the Republicans can say is 'no.' They’ve apparently decided that it’s easier to repeat the familiar talking points than actually think through a response to the extraordinary crisis at hand.

"If the Republicans wanted to do the country some good, they’d embrace an entirely different approach.

"First, they’d take the current economic crisis more seriously than the Democrats...Republicans could point out that this crisis is not just an opportunity to do other things. It’s a bloomin’ emergency. Robert Barro of Harvard estimates that there is a 30 percent chance of a depression."

After their weekly strategy meeting this morning, House Republicans sent out their attack puppy Eric Cantor to complain that Obama is not focusing enough on the economy:

"At the end of the day, we are in an economic emergency. Economists are saying that there's a 30 percent likelihood that we're going to be in a depression. My goodness, we do have an emergency, and we oughta say, look, priority No. 1 is to create jobs."

Boehner and his clueless bunch are showing better judgment about where to get their marching orders. Brooks is a big step up from Limbaugh.

Muscular Moderation

For over two years, David Brooks has been torturing himself--and us--over his infatuation with Barack Obama and the nagging conservative conscience that makes him feel guilty about it.

In today's column, he tries to resolve his anguish with "A Moderate Manifesto" that accuses his love object of leading "a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor--caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it to solve all problems at once."

His attack on the Obama budget tries to put an intellectual gloss on the reflexive attacks of know-nothing Republicans by finding in it "a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new."

Say again? The unconflicted part of Brooks' brain surely knows that the social engineering in this century has been the Bush-Cheney attempt to weaken government and revive 19th century laissez-faire capitalism with deregulation and tax cuts for the very rich that helped create an economic mess, which now demands an attempt to "solve all problems at once."

But it is not enough for him to maintain his conservative credentials by joining in the general unease over the uncharted territory into which Obama by necessity is leading a country on the brink of bankruptcy. Brooks has to find something positive to proclaim:

"We moderates are going to have to assert ourselves. We’re going to have to take a centrist tendency that has been politically feckless and intellectually vapid and turn it into an influential force."

Lots of luck to Brooks on inventing a new form of muscular moderation, but meanwhile the rest of us can join him in this reality check:

"The only thing more scary than Obama’s experiment is the thought that it might fail and the political power will swing over to a Republican Party that is currently unfit to wield it."

Stimulus Triskadecaphobia

Passing the $789 trillion bill on Friday the 13th, as Congress seems ready to do, may be a risky move in view of all the voodoo fears about it.

The national mood, as reflected on the editorial pages of today's New York Times, is fingers crossed and fasten your seat belts.

"I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach," Paul Krugman writes, "a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years. The best may not lack all conviction, but they seem alarmingly willing to settle for half-measures. And the worst are, as ever, full of passionate intensity, oblivious to the grotesque failure of their doctrine in practice."

On his right, David Brooks has a gloomy future retrospective: "The nation had essentially bet its future on economic models with primitive views of human behavior. The government had tried to change social psychology using the equivalent of leeches and bleeding. Rather than blame themselves, Americans directed their anger toward policy makers and experts who based estimates of human psychology on mathematical equations."

Amid these gloomy overtones of Hobbes, Yeats et al, the editorial writers steer a mildly optimistic middle course:

"The bill is, for the most part, a step in the right direction. But political wrangling, including President Obama’s futile pursuit of bipartisanship, rendered it smaller and less focused than it needed to be...

"The administration’s next shot at advancing its economic aims will be Mr. Obama’s first budget. The new president should stop courting Republicans who have shown no interest in compromise or real economic fixes. The budget resolution is immune from filibustering. If every Republican wants to vote against it, Mr. Obama should leave them to explain that decision to voters who are in danger of losing their jobs or their houses or both."

Sounds hopeful but, just to be on the safe side, shouldn't Congress wait to pass the stimulus until after midnight when the black cats have done their worst and Valentine's Day will bring cuddly thoughts of bipartisan love into the Capitol?

Bank Rescue: Tim Geithner's Times

The Treasury Secretary is announcing his plan to save the banks this morning, but the New York Times has it all before he says a word.

A front-page story reports that "Mr. Geithner, who will announce the broad outlines of the plan on Tuesday, successfully fought against more severe limits on executive pay for companies receiving government aid.

"He resisted those who wanted to dictate how banks would spend their rescue money. And he prevailed over top administration aides who wanted to replace bank executives and wipe out shareholders at institutions receiving aid."

On the editorial page, David Brooks, without bothering to tell us how he knows, offers Geithner's thinking about the process with direct quotes:

"The key, he says, is to create 'massive, sustained and substantial macroeconomic policy' that would pump capital into markets to get them working again. The heart of his program is a series of public-private investment funds...One would acquire toxic assets. One would foster consumer and small-business lending. 'There’s a lot of private capital out there that wants to come in. It just can’t get the financing,' Geithner insists. The new programs would encourage private investors, and then once the markets are unfrozen, would 'get out as quickly as possible.'”

With all this inside information, it's not surprising that Brooks finds "Geithner’s plan is huge but also disciplined. It’s designed by someone aware of government’s limitations."

If Treasury's attempt to make its new bank rescue plan seem tempered rather than toothless is half as successful in the real world as it already is with the newspaper of record, we can all stop worrying without bothering to listen to what Geithner himself has to say today.

Who knew it was going to be this easy?

Bonfire of the Vanities, a Sequel

When Tom Wolfe dramatized the Age of Greed in the 1980s, his novel satirizing the downfall of a Wall Street Master of the Universe was not taken as prophecy, but reality is overtaking his art.

Now David Brooks, the New York Times pop sociologist in residence, is declaring that "after the TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the Fed rescue packages and various other federal interventions, rich people no longer get to set their own rules.

"Now lifestyle standards for the privileged class are set by...Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants" who "get to insert themselves into the intricacies of upscale life, influencing when private jets can be flown, when friends can lend each other their limousines and at what golf resorts corporate learning retreats can be held."

Brooks exaggerates, of course, but the trend is undeniable. Automakers flying private jets to ask for government handouts, huge bonuses for Wall Street bunglers and $35,000 commodes for an executive washroom are inflaming a public beset by job losses, home foreclosures and shrinking retirement plans.

The automakers, no matter how badly they have mismanaged their industry, are still in the business of producing something to be used. Their Wall Street counterparts, on the other hand, have been engaged in making huge amounts of money by managing money, a set of skills that 21st century America has overvalued even more than running around an athletic field or making faces for a movie camera.

The traditional economy that depended on goods and professional services has receded into the background (even health care is dominated by not by healers but insurance company money manipulators).

In the dire days ahead, one consolation may be a true Bonfire of the Vanities, in which there is a return to valuing the work of those who build the structures of society and keep it going rather than the Masters of the Universe who play Monopoly with real money and destroy lives.

The Coming of a Can-Do Government

In the wreckage of this week's news, it's encouraging to watch the Obama Administration taking shape with an emphasis on extreme competence (no heck-of-a-job Brownie in the lot).

Today's New York Times describes it as "tilting toward the center, inviting a clash of ideas," but the left-right analysis seems less to the point than the question of getting things done as transition team members "believe that the new administration will have no time for a learning curve."

Starting with the choice of Rahm Emanuel, a can-do guy if there ever was one, the new President clearly intends to surround himself with brains and real-world experience rather than like-mindedness and loyalty.

That was reflected in the leak yesterday about the new Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, a pragmatist with deep experience, whose choice sent the stock market into euphoria. As America's face to the financial world, he will represent steady resolve compared to former Treasury chief Lawrence Summers, a bombastic figure Obama considered putting back into the job, who will likely end up in the White House as a senior economic adviser.

After such choices as the new Attorney General Eric Holder, Peter Orszag as Budget Director and Greg Craig as White House Counsel, conservative David Brooks calls the new Obama team "more impressive than any other in recent memory...open-minded individuals who are persuadable by evidence...admired professionals" who are "not excessively partisan" and "not ideological."

How does Hillary Clinton fit into this picture? She certainly would not blend into the Obama woodwork, but there is something more at stake in her choice as Secretary of State. For those who have become unsure about American values, she would make the Bush-Cheney worldview look like the aberration it has been and reassure continuity of our good intentions and good sense.

As with all of Obama's other choices, personal loyalty would be beside the point.

Fall of the Know-It-Alls

The humiliation of Alan Greenspan last week in publicly admitting his fallible perception of the housing bubble prompts David Brooks to see a larger meaning:

"This meltdown is not just a financial event, but also a cultural one. It’s a big, whopping reminder that the human mind is continually trying to perceive things that aren’t true, and not perceiving them takes enormous effort."

It's also a reminder of what has always been the motivation, aside from greed, of not only the so-called experts but the run-of-the-mill stock market investor--the psychic need to be "in the know," to be able to see more than anyone else and profit from it.

In the era of 24/7 cable financial news, it's not just the talking heads but the watchers who are constantly trying to confirm their superior perception--a modern version of the traditional gambler's search for grace in the roll of the dice or turn of the cards--the need to feel superior to the rest of humanity.

"My sense," Brooks writes, "is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking."

Maybe so, but all that social science may end up just staring at that primal urge that drives human beings to prove themselves special by being "in the know."

Big Government Bugaboo

George W. Bush is leaving conservatives with their worst nightmare, an economic disaster that will, in David Brooks' words, bring on a "Gingrich revolution in reverse and on steroids...a big increase in spending and deficits...The over-reach is coming."

In a moment when government held hostage by Bush-Cheney has brought on economic disasters that are forcing socialization of banks and a foreign policy that is dumping $10 billion a month into an avoidable war, Brooks' worries that Democrats may spend money to save the economy are, to put it kindly, overwrought.

The "Gingrich revolution" served only to bring government to a standstill by holding budgets hostage and pushing the impeachment of Bill Clinton at a time when the US was running surpluses, only to be followed by an all-Republican regime that went on a monstrous binge of deficit spending.

The overriding issue is not big vs. little government but smart vs. dumb, government with some heart vs. a Scrooge-like counting house, government that will spend its way out of recession on bridges that don't fall down, decent education and health care for kids rather than bridges to nowhere and the wrong wars.

As Bush and Paulson undertake their socialist intervention in the banking system they failed to regulate, that kind of big government may appeal to most voters.

Cracked Republican Coalition

As the McCain-Palin campaign veers Wild Westward, the GOP Eastern elite is dropping off the wagon train.

CNN reports a "conservative backlash" to McCain's mortgage proposal with the National Review deriding the plan as "creating a level of moral hazard that is unacceptable."

George Will says "the McCain-Palin campaign's attempt to get Americans to focus on Obama's Chicago associations seems surreal--or, as a British politician once said about criticism he was receiving, 'like being savaged by a dead sheep.'"

Peggy Noonan issues "a warning" to Republicans: "When your crowds go from 'I love you' to 'I hate the other guy,' you are in trouble, you are on a losing strain. Winning campaigns are built on love."

David Brooks observes that "no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the 'normal Joe Sixpack American' and the coastal elite. She is another step in the Republican change of personality."

David Gergen goes from his CNN gig to the Colbert Report to repeat his warnings about Palin's stirring of racial hatred.

As the best Republican brains desert the McCain cause, he is in danger of being isolated among the yahoos and crackpots.

The Case for McCain

In a hybrid of defense closing argument and political obituary, David Brooks in today's New York Times comes forward as a character witness for "a serious man prone to serious things."

Citing his candor, humility, "crusade" against corruption and, most of all, his "impressive" years as the Iraq war deteriorated, Brooks attempts to separate that John McCain from today's campaigner "without a groundbreaking argument about why he is different" who has had to "rely on tactical gimmicks to stay afloat."

Brooks says that failure comes "in part because of his Senate training and the tendency to take issues on one at a time—-in part, because of the foolish decision to run a traditional right-left campaign against Obama and, in part, because McCain has never really resolved the contradiction between the Barry Goldwater and Teddy Roosevelt sides of his worldview.

"One day he’s a small-government Western conservative; the next he’s a Bull Moose progressive. The two don’t add up--as we’ve seen in his uneven reaction to the financial crisis."

Such personal admiration is understandable and poignant but, as this past week has shown, can't be the crucial element in a voter's decision about who should lead us out of the mess of the Bush-Cheney years, of which McCain himself, going back to the 2000 primaries, is one of the victims.

But Brooks persists in his loyalty: "If McCain is elected, he will retain his instinct for the hard challenge. With that Greatest Generation style of his, he will run the least partisan administration in recent times."

To others, based on the campaign McCain is waging, that confidence is as misplaced as associating with the Greatest Generation someone who was five years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

"Little Minds" Assault on Obama

After years of Bush's always-wrong-but-never-in-doubt presidency, Republican swiftboaters are launching their first attack ad on Obama, telling MTV watchers, among others, that he's "Both Ways Barack--worse than a flip-flopper!"

A young generation, some of whom may actually have been paying attention in high school and college, will find irony in having their favorite candidate under fire for what they learned from reading F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

It was Obama's unBushlike intelligence that excited the New York Times' conservative columnist David Brooks back in 2006: “He has a compulsive tendency to see both sides of an issue...And yet this style is surely the antidote to the politics of the past several years. It is surely true that a President who brings a deliberative style to the White House will multiply his knowledge, not divide it.”

But ambivalence is too complicated a concept for the 527 smearers who trashed John Kerry, a decorated war veteran, for his Vietnam service in favor of George W. Bush, who dodged going there, and they are banking on voters to be easy marks for their shell game again.

Their new commercial shows headlines ("Obama's Changes Raise Issue: Can You Believe Him?") with a voice-over, "People are saying that Senator Obama's recent changes of position have made him a flip-flopper. He's not! Flip-floppers only hold one position at a time. Senator Obama is different: He holds two positions at the same time."

If voters want to go further back in seeing through the smokescreen, they can check Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1841 essay on self-reliance, in which he urges "Trust thyself“ and observes that "To be great is to be misunderstood” and “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Sad Hearts at the Supermarket

David Brooks today straddles the gap between social pressures and personal responsibility in "The Culture of Debt" by insisting that, in digging America out of its mountain of debt, "the important shifts will be private, as people and communities learn and adopt different social standards.

"After the Depression, a savings mentality set in. After the dot-com bubble, a bit of sobriety hit Silicon Valley. Now it’s the borrowers’ and lenders’ turn. As the saying goes: People don’t change when they see the light. They change when they feel the heat."

Brooks' optimism about "a bit of sobriety" is a nice Conservative try to ease the pressure off the banks, credit card companies and sellers of stuff for the waves of debt that are now threatening to drown so many Americans. Why did all those irresponsible swimmers plunge so far out?

But he may want to look back at the early 1960s to an America wallowing in post-World War II prosperity when the poet-critic Randall Jarrell was warning in "A Sad Heart at the Supermarket" about a society that "needs for us to be buyers, consumers, beings who want much and will want more --who want consistently and insatiably," in which "the product or services which seemed yesterday an unthinkable luxury is today an inexorable necessity."

Bigger homes with zero down, newer cars with delayed payments, electronic gadgets galore, flying everywhere on impulse, credit cards for jobless new college graduates in a world of hyper-consumerism and retail therapy ("When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping")...

If he were still alive, Randall Jarrell's supermarket sadness would surely be deeper than ever, but then again what would a poet know about the real world?

The Genius of George W. Bush

In an era of information and ideas moving at the speed of light, the rehabilitation has begun on both sides of the Atlantic.

Over here, David Brooks celebrates Bush's "stubbornness" and asserts that "when it comes to Iraq, Bush was at his worst when he was humbly deferring to the generals and at his best when he was arrogantly overruling them. During that period in 2006 and 2007, Bush stiffed the brass," took the advice of such strategic geniuses as Dick Cheney, John McCain and Lindsey Graham and, lo and behold, the Surge "has produced large, if tenuous, gains."

Before long, Brooks concludes that "the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right." If playing nursemaid to a dysfunctional government, having American troops patrol Baghdad in rolling steel fortresses and spending billions of dollars with no end in sight is getting it right, Brooks may have a point about his "supposed dolt."

On the other side of the ocean, Andrew Roberts of the Telegraph sees Bush as a latter-day Harry Truman "who set the United States on the course that ended decades later in the defeat of Communism.

"If the West wins the modern counterpart of that struggle, the War Against Terror, historians will look back in amazement at the present unpopularity of George W Bush, and marvel at it quite as much as we now marvel at the 67 per cent disapproval rates for Truman throughout 1952."

If, as the saying goes, wishes were horses, we would all be riding in style and George W. Bush would be leading the parade. It's comforting that we may be "misunderestimating" him, but there will be plenty of time to think about that when he is out power and has stopped saving the world.

Barack Doesn't Send Flowers Any More

Last year, John McCain felt the fury of media scorn, and now it's Barack Obama's turn for the hurt feelings of journalists as passions cool after their first encounters.

The Times' David Brooks, who was deeply in love late in 2006, is sharing his pain today after suffering from what he previously described as "Obama Comedown Syndrome":

"All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades."

Earlier in the year, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurta complained, "The Illinois senator remains a remote figure to those covering him," a complaint echoed by Newsweek correspondent Richard Wolffe, "There is no charm offensive from the candidate toward the press corps."

For other MSM infatuees, the letdown started this month with a rueful letter to the campaign about Obama's sneaking out on reporters for a rendezvous with Hillary Clinton while they waited on a plane to Chicago the weekend before her concession:

"The decision to mislead reporters is a troubling one. We hope this does not presage a relationship with the Obama campaign that is not based on a mutual respect for the truth."

The rest of us may be forgiven for taking all this as the natural course of adolescent crushes, remembering how enthralled they all were with the "straight talk" of John McCain and the "guy you'd like to have a beer with" charm of George W. Bush when they were all younger and more naïve eight years ago.

If Obama isn't spending too much time making MSM pulses race these days, the rest of us can sympathize with their hurt feelings and, with a little tough love from older and possibly wiser heads, tell them to get over it.