Brooks's Brother

Confronted with today's David Brooks column in the New York Times, in which he touts the presidential character of Barack Obama over that of Hillary Clinton, without so much as mentioning a single Republican candidate, one doesn't quite now how to react. There's the:

-Literalist View: Is this the unofficial concession of (at least) the G.O.P.'s all-but-extinct Rockefeller wing?

-Conspiracy Theory #1: Is Brooks pumping up Obama in order to avert a Clinton candidacy that he thinks will present a more formidable challenge to the eventual Republican nominee in the general election?

-Or, Conspiracy Theory #2: Is this a subtle way for Brooks to burnish his non-racist bona fides in the wake of his apropos-of-nothing column defending Ronald Reagan's infamous campaign-kickoff at the Neshoba County Fair, which unleashed a wave of recrimination from fellow Times columnists Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert?

Brooks, the Conservative Liberals Like™, long ago broke with the Bush administration--and therefore the core of his own Republican party, but this column is remarkable nonetheless for its apparent endorsement of a Democratic candidate without caveat or qualification. What gives? If the column's status among the Times's Democratic-skewing on-line readership as today's most emailed article is any indication, I'm likely not the only one with this question. (Too bad the editors seem to have disabled "public comments" on their Op-Ed columnists, a development I like to attribute to one particularly sharp rebuke I delivered to Thomas Friedman which would have claimed one of the top spots in the "comments" owing to my having posted mere minute after his column appeared one night--had it ever appeared; shortly thereafter, the comments section disappeared. Hey, a man can dream.).

If there is any good faith to be found in Brooks's column today, it is tempting to see it as another measure of the opportunity awaiting the Democratic party, if not the remnants of the American left. If Republicans--even "moderate" ones--are writing off the next presidential election nearly a year before the fact, one might imagine that 2008 contains the promise of political transformation on a par with, say, 1932.

Such thinking is premature and, from my point of view, much too optimistic. First, one should not mistake the relative disaffection of Republican primary voters with their presidential field for any accurate representation of a given candidates' prospects in the general election. Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, and even Mitt Romney would all present a formidable challenge to any of the potential Democratic nominees (which, at this point, political experts seem to agree, consist of Clinton and Obama, not necessarily in that order--a mere binary that invites suppositions of bad faith, such as my own, when Republicans deign to anoint either of the two), especially if paired with John McCain, as seems eminently possible, especially if Giuliani wins the nomination.

Further, one should not underestimate the structural obstacles that now stand between the electorate's vaunted (and much poll-tested) desire for change and the translation of that mandate into political reality. I'm referring here not to the various vote-suppression tactics employed by the G.O.P. (though these should not be discounted) so much as the media-enabled and currently predominant politics of personality (for some dismaying evidence--if any is required--and an interesting reaction to same, check out Stanley Fish's recent NYT blog).

This focus on "character" and other such intangible--and eminently malleable--attributes all comes at the expense of attention paid to policy, and it will make it possible for any of the Republican candidates to run in the general election as an agent of "change," no matter how slavish his adherence to the conservative orthodoxies that currently have a suzerain hold on this country. All that will be required is rhetorical readjustment and an affable demeanor, which an amnesiac populace will forget are precisely the horses that the present regime rode to power.

But let's, for the sake of argument, concede that the Democrats are exceptionally well positioned for 2008, to the point where they could attain not only the White House but also the kind of Congressional majorities required to enact meaningful legislative and regulatory change. The question then becomes: What will they do with this moment?

Given the evidence from the Democrats' tenure as majority party in the House and the Senate, coupled with the statements emanating from the presidential campaigns (excepting Dennis Kucinich), the answer has got to be: precious little. Some observers on the left ascribe the Democrats' incrementalism and readiness to compromise to timidity. Others of a more pragmatic and parlaimentarian bent cite the difficulty of achieving veto-proof supermajorities in the Senate. But while each of these explanations have something to offer, they miss the larger point that the Democratic party as a national entity amounts to far less, for the political aims of its base, than the sum of its constituent parts.

This is due in part to the diverse nature of that constituency relative to that of its Republican counterpart; the Democratic base rarely speaks with a unified voice, even for the sake of appearances in the way that, for example, tax-policy Republicans are content to mumble Christian platitudes. It's also has a great deal to do with who those constituents are: the poor, the otherwise disfranchised, and those in natural opposition to a dedicated Republican constituent (as is the case with labor vis-a-vis business owners). They have, as has been said, nowhere else to go, at least not in the present two-party framework.

And yet the Republican alternatives have remained reliably and sufficiently repugnant, over the years, to hold these constituents within the Democratic party. Democratic candidates are happy to have their votes but most who end up serving at the national level have little intention of enacting their various agenda. What they offer, instead, is a tray of slightly different shape than that carried by the Republicans for the offering up of an ever-greater share of power, wealth, and resources to those interests which already possess these things in abundance.

If you find this too facile, too cynical, or just too uncomfortably Naderite, then consider Hillary's health-care plan, which Republican candidates deride as "socialized medicine" for the sake of stirring up their base, but which contains huge giveaways to the insurance industry. And to many Americans--including, sadly, many self-described but under-informed "liberals--Hillary appears the very embodiment of progressivism.

So it will be interesting, should a Democratic landslide actually materialize next Election Day, to note what the Democrats on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue actually do with the mandate. Perhaps the real watershed will arrive when it becomes plain that, even when voters supply Democrats with the political means to effect change, things stay the same.

In the meantime, we might keep our skepticism intact when the likes of Brooks praises any candidate for pursuing "liberal ends in gradualist, temperamentally conservative ways."