Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

There’s No Moderation

...in Obama’s TRANSFORMATIONAL LIBERALISM, the moderate David Brooks finally notices. More moderates should have noticed this BEFORE the election, along with what would surely be the consequences of UNIFIED Democratic government. Brooks is right that rallying the moderates against Euro-transformationalism can’t have much to do with Rush.

Discussions - 9 Comments

he he he, we won, y'all lost, elections have consequences, etc etc. I must say, it's quite fun to come here and read the outrage over and over again. Y'all had 8 years of Bush, and 4 years of unified govt (you even had the Supreme Court, which we'll not likely get) and you put this country into a nose dive. Now sit back and watch the TRANSFORMATIONAL LIBERAL grownups try to clean up your mess.

That was truly a great aricle by Davis brooks. I am very intrigued but his "moderate" (libertarian) position! I think all his points are fundamentally true and as such he should support me in my run for the senate! The question I found auspicially missing from the article is what are the real long term effects of this liberal agenda. They are not good in relationship to the pathetic deficit bush and "fiscal conservatives" have given us. The real truth it turns out is that Clinton should have been given 4 more years!!!!

Well, here's hoping he wakes up some other moderates, but the truth is Brooks remains in a fantasy-land where sage Manhattanite moderates are the nation's saviors, and the only ones fit to govern: "The only thing more scary than Obama’s experiment is the thought that it might fail and the political power will swing over to a Republican Party that is currently unfit to wield it." The ONLY thing? That is crazy in too many ways to count, even if it smooths things along for the NYT readers.

Look, either we'd be better off under the budget we would have had under a McCain presidency, (or even a Romney presidency), or we'd be better off under what Brooks rightly calls Obama's "uber-partisan" budget of the left. Choose already. See, the problem with the MULTIPLICATION TABLE is that it doesn't lie. Everyone can debate ad naseum about whether the conservatives are dumber/more-partisan than they were back in the golden dawn of Reaganism, but Brooks has to admit the simple math of the thing: we're being asked to move from a govt. that utilizes 20% of the GDP to one of 30% or 40%. Mathematically speaking there can be no question that Republicans aren't the extremists. And when the difference turns out to be that stark, one has to ask why the sage moderate didn't have an inkling of it prior to the election. One has to wonder why the "tired" conservative thinking proved more prescient than Brooks' thinking.

And c'mon--McCain wins the Republican nomination and Brooks boo-hoos that he has no ideological home? Let the man rattle his NYT readers, sure, but let him be a little humbler the next time he dresses down the ditto-heads who supposedly dominate American conservatism. Their instincts about Obama have so far proved better than his.

Carl, that line popped off the page for me too as particularly outrageous...and it says something about Brooks that he's just really noticing Obama is not quite the centrist he artfully billed himself as....and I'll say this too: while the NYTimes readership might make the problem worse, Brooks always had a penchant for trying to hit a moderate tone that was more of an obsequious gesture to the intellectual left than a seriously non-partisan philosophical position.

It amazes me the a man of Brooks’ seeming intelligence can have deluded himself into thinking that he actually believed that Obama was a Moderate on ANY level.

But, perhaps for self-named Moderates like Brooks; saying nothing definitively anti-conservative, while playing down a completely liberal public voting record, ignoring or disavowing long-time ultra-liberal associates, and denigrating both conservative opponents and constituents, all qualifies you as a “Moderate.”

My definition of a Moderate is slightly different; “Someone who is too smart to be a Liberal and too weak to be a Conservative.”

Peter, when do "moderates" rally? People who can't make up their mind and fashion for themselves a pleasing descriptive for their continued indecision are not likely to find the gumption to "take a stand" against much of anything. LEAST of all against a candidate who enjoys the support of the establishment and the media. As I noted before, no one rallies to an uncertain trumphet. As for Brooks,' his belated cri de couer is simply farcical.

Mechelle asks how was it that Brooks fell for this nonsense? The key is ego. Brooks knew that as a politician Obama was likely to lie, or rather to indulge in misdirection, for Brooks would never use so robust a word as "lie." But those expediencies, those evasions, were for the masses, not for him. Brooks' ego prevented him entertaining the notion that the Ivy Leaguer would deceive him, a grad of The University of Chicago and a columnist for "the paper of record."

What a disturbing jolt it must have been for Brooks to discover that Obama treated him no better than the rest, despite his prominence. It must have been like being on the A-list for the social circuit and then overnight finding yourself bounced. Recall too that Brooks met with Obama, so the deception wasn't simply an abstraction, it was PERSONAL.

Wicked sharp jab by Ivan and pretty deserved. It was always a mystery to me how - based on their records - one could see Obama as more of a policy moderate than McCain. And lets not forget Brooks' summer "Praise Song On Joe Biden" article in which he extolled the virtues of a shameless, hyperpartisan, egotistical clown. Shame that he chooses to rally the moderates now that they are totally impotent.

Also, I've been critical of Limbaugh elsewhere. I take none of it back, but to be fair and balanced, I have to admit that Carl is right and that Limbaugh was alot closer to how Obama would govern than Brooks.

Anyone who chose Obama because they thought he was "moderate" needs to learn some basic reasoning skills. He had the single most liberal voting record in the Senate. John McCain, by contrast, has made a career of reaching across the aisle to write and pass legislation. If you were looking for a moderate (or bi-partisan) President, John McCain should have been your poster boy. Obama was the furthest thing from that. No one should be surprised by the results of this election. We are getting what we paid for -- the most liberal member of the Senate, doing what liberals do.

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