Okay, from what I gather, David Brooks was a right-winger that left-wingers could like. It was not so much that he was a moderate conservative, but because he was intelligence and not a polemicist. He was, to be blunt, the opposite of someone like Ann Coulter.
I've always thought that The New York Times could use a stronger conservative voice (and some better liberal voices, if you ask me) on its editorial pages. So when I heard that the paper hired Brooks, I did some research on him, and seemed like a good pick.
What the hell went wrong? How could someone respected on both sides turn out to be so...bad?
His column today, entitled "Sense and Sensibility," really puzzles me. He seems to say that Kerry and Bush are different, in that Kerry thinks of things in mechanical, practical terms, whereas Bush is in the clouds over moral issues. Well, okay. Reprinted below, his conclusion really seems to go off the deep end:
Nonetheless, I suspect that the reason Bush's approval ratings hover around 50 percent, despite a year of carnage in Iraq, is because of the reason many of us in the commentariat don't like to talk about: in a faithful and moralistic nation, Bush's language has a resonance with people who know that he is not always competent, and who know that he doesn't always dominate every argument, but who can sense a shared cast of mind.
Am I the only one who is kind of scared of that argument?