What a schmuck. David Brooks writes an essay in which he claims the republicans are having problems with Social Security, Terri Schiavo and Tom DeLay because Americans are "conservative." He goes on to opine that this is very bad news for Democrats because "now the party is being led by people who are guaranteed to alienate those voters even more: the highly educated and secular university-town elites who follow Howard Dean and believe Bush hatred and stridency are the outward signs of righteousness."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/09/opinion/09brooks.html
Some other equally foolish assertions of Herr Brooks:
"According to a Democracy Corps poll, the Democratic Party's standing has dropped eight percentage points since the election."
He never addresses how much the republican party has fallen in the same time.
And he claims that Danny Hastert should be the face of the republican party:
"The public face of the Republican Party these days should be, when he recovers from minor surgery, the House speaker, Denny Hastert. This is a moment for leaders who seem stolid and secure, a moment for tortoises, not hares."
It looks to me like Brooks is trying to soothe the fears of the neocons and other repubs by saying that they are not "conservative" enough. This may be true for that small number of true conservatives on the right, but I think the vast majority of independents in this country have seen enough of conservatism for a long time.