Random header image... Refresh for more!

Fecking Brooks and the Moderates Up

by Scott H. Payne

David Brooks has received mostly taunting for his trouble in writing a New York Times op-ed last week lamenting Obama’s failure to govern from the center. Most of taunts have come from the right, deriding Brooks for failing to recognize earlier that Obama is a classic, dyed-in-the-wool, tax and spend, big government liberal. That taunting may be fair all told, but I think it misses the more intriguing element of Brooks’ piece: that moderate on both the left and the right band together to influence the political process.

I can’t help but think that Brooks dead-on when he writes,

Those of us in the moderate tradition — the Hamiltonian tradition that believes in limited but energetic government — thus find ourselves facing a void. 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.

What Brooks; however, fails to do is to outline what step number one in the moderate resurrection project must be. Namely, Brooks goes on to talk about all the things that moderates must do before first articulating what it is that has led the majority of Americans to see moderates as “politically feckless and intellectually vapid” and how moderates can effectively seek to overcome that barrier. [Read more →]

March 10, 2009   11 Comments

Page 1 of 11