Beacon Street Journal

After the revelation that Obama is going to govern as a die-hard, big government liberal, The New York Times House Conservative, David Brooks, suddenly feels duped: “Obama is not who we thought he was”, he recently lamented in his latest column. He should speak for himself.

Throughout his entire campaign for the presidency, many had warned about the irreconcilable gap between Obama’s soothing words and his voluntary past associations with radicals, racists and other nefarious anti-American types that belied the myth, carefully crafted by an adoring media, that Obama was somehow going to be a transcendent politician bringing people together. People like Brooks ignored these glaring contradictions and instead chose to be hypnotized by Obama’s vacuous and empty rhetoric. As such, his sudden epiphany that he now realizes that Obama has chosen to govern from the left, can only be characterized as downright comical.

Brooks became enamored by Obama after he won the Iowa caucus in January, 2008:

Obama has achieved something remarkable. At first blush, his speeches are abstract, secular sermons of personal uplift — filled with disquisitions on the nature of hope and the contours of change. He talks about erasing old categories like red and blue (and implicitly, black and white) and replacing them with new categories, of which the most important are new and old. He seems at first more preoccupied with changing thinking than changing legislation.

Subsequent to his Iowa victory however, there were numerous unpleasant truths revealed about Obama that were wholly inconsistent with the fictional, rosy persona proffered by the media and adopted wholeheartedly by those such as Brooks. If his head were not buried in the sand, these serial inconsistencies and contradictions, should have been more than sufficient to disabuse Brooks of his idol worship. As details about Obama’s past liberal voting record as a politician in Illinois and Washington came to the fore, Brooks apparently remained unconvinced that he would, as president, govern from the hard left. 

Then of course, there was the Reverend Wright controversy, which should have been sufficient, in and of itself, for a reexamination of one of the fraudulent pretexts of Obama’s campaign theme: that he was the post-racial candidate. Throw into the sordid mix the likes of Father Pfleger, unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, and you have a situation that surely should have raised some eyebrows amongst those who somehow still believed that Obama was uniquely qualified to bring people together. Many, especially members of the media, turned a blind eye to these unpleasant truths. Count Brooks among those whose credulity was not sufficiently strained. 

A month before the election, Brooks continued to sing paeans of praise for the New Messiah. Having been dazzled by Obama’s prodigious intellect and erudition, in terms of any critical review of Obama, for Brooks, the question always seemed to be, what’s not to like? Good heavens, the man is a disciple of Ronald Niebuhr! And, since it was a safe bet that Kierkegaard, Sartre and Martin Bubber were not on her summer reading list, by comparison, Sarah Palin was simply too lowbrow and anti-intellectual for the likes of Brooks. Indeed, after his effusive praise for Obama, he characterized her as representing, “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party.”

Brooks plea for the Republican Party to adopt his brand  of “moderate conservatism” is going to fall upon deaf ears. Republicans tried his “third way” philosophy under the guise of eight years of George Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” It has left a fractured and dispirited party in its wake.