New York Times Death Spiral Watch

David Brooks calls Barack Obama an inauthentic rootless cosmopolite:

David Brooks: Obama has been a sojourner.... [B]ecause of his unique background and temperament, Obama lives apart. He put one foot in the institutions he rose through on his journey but never fully engaged. As a result, voters have trouble placing him in his context, understanding the roots and values in which he is ineluctably embedded.

Last week Jodi Kantor of The Times described Obama’s 12 years at the University of Chicago Law School. “The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count,” Kantor wrote.... He was in the law school, but not of it. This has been a consistent pattern throughout his odyssey....

He became a state legislator, but he was in the Legislature, not of it.... He was in Trinity United Church of Christ, but not of it.... He is in the United States Senate, but not of it....

This ability to stand apart accounts for his fantastic powers of observation, and his skills as a writer and thinker. It means that people on almost all sides of any issue can see parts of themselves reflected in Obama’s eyes. But it does make him hard to place.

When we’re judging candidates (or friends), we don’t just judge the individuals but the milieus that produced them. We judge them by the connections that exist beyond choice and the ground where they will go home to be laid to rest....

If Obama is fully a member of any club — and perhaps he isn’t — it is the club of smart post-boomer meritocrats. We now have a cohort of rising leaders, Obama’s age and younger, who climbed quickly through elite schools and now ascend from job to job. They are conscientious and idealistic while also being coldly clever and self-aware. It’s not clear what the rest of America makes of them...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Comments

[Alan]

It really sucks to have a deadline and no inspiration -- and also the requirement that Thou Shalt Not Trash Republicans. Why don't they just have him write about tomato gardening from here on in?

[save_the_rustbelt]

I know a lot of HRC supporters who seem to agree. Did Brooks get one right?

The bitterness is lingering longer than I thought possible.

HRC in 2012?

[George Smiley]

"If Obama is fully a member of any club — and perhaps he isn’t — it is the club of smart post-boomer meritocrats. We now have a cohort of rising leaders, Obama’s age and younger, who climbed quickly through elite schools and now ascend from job to job. They are conscientious and idealistic while also being coldly clever and self-aware. It’s not clear what the rest of America makes of them..."

I know what I make of them. They're a hell of a lot smarter than David Brooks is.

[Stlinquirer]

"If Obama is fully a member of any club — and perhaps he isn’t — it is the club of smart post-boomer meritocrats."

Shorter David Brooks - I have absolutely nothing to report of any worth so I will make up a hypothetical, assert its truth, and then note that it may not be true after all to make me seem evenhanded.

Bonus racial subtext - Obama is not like "the rest of America". He doesn't "belong".

Bonus idiotic anti-intellectualism/anti-Americanism - America doesn't like them high-achieving types that have worked incredibly hard and taken advantage of the avenues of American meritocracy still available to "the rest of America" while the wealthy consolidate more and more of America's wealth and power.

[Retrogrouch]

I'm calling dog-whistle politics here. The repeated reference to John 17: "In the World, not of it" is yet another code word attack intended for the evangelical christianist community.

First you have McCain's ad, referring to Obama as "The One" (read anti-christ). Now you have Brooks playing his role by using language intended to evoke christ like attributes, but in a way that ties Obama not to the kingdom of God, but to worldly institutions like law schools, state legislatures, scary radical black-panther churches (sic), and the US senate.

Again, in the evangelical mind, the anti-christ will have christ-like attributes, but be thoroughly of the world and not the kingdom of God.

Yet again Brooks plays his part in a coordinated attack effort... how can his editors not see this. Surely the times and PBS can find a conservative who is not so OBVIOUSLY a puppet... but then they would have to WANT to find an independent conservative. The death of the times and PBS news hour cannot come soon enough for me.

[Denis Drew]

Obama's place hopping may be attributed to the phenomenon of the most able tending to rise to the top the fastest. He is in any event the first fully presidential level intelligence running for the White House since Richard Nixon (Bill Clinton may have qualified were he deeply motivated by anything more fundamental than playing the political game).

[donna]

Brooks is an inauthentic stupid man.

[Joe S.]

Inauthentic rootless cosmopolite . . .

Is Baruch Obama really Jewish?

Hmmm. Maybe Brooks should note for his next column that Obama has NEVER been seen eating Oysters Rockefeller, New England Clam Chowder, or any other triple trefe concoction. That proves it.

[Ginger Yellow]

"We now have a cohort of rising leaders, Obama’s age and younger, who climbed quickly through elite schools and now ascend from job to job. They are conscientious and idealistic while also being coldly clever and self-aware."

Surely this is a good thing. Heaven forfend that society should promote clever, conscientious, self-aware young people.

[Murray Bowles]

"In the world but not of it" -- didn't St Paul claim that was a Good Thing?

[Anon]

The GOP meme of the week is that Obama is different; he's not US, he's THEM.

Brooks is just playing along. He earned five McCain Points for doing so.

[Richard Cownie]

Pure drivel. A guy who goes straight to Chicago after law school, lives there, works there, teaches there for 12 years at U of C, joins a local church, gets married, has two daughters and owns a house is now "rootless" ?

Pure, utter, mindless garbage.

The good news is that Brooks is about the smartest guy the Republicans have got, and he's going to be thinking up the smartest attack he can. And if this is it, Team Red is just totally screwed. Couldn't happen to a nicer gang.

Perhaps the only interesting thing about these various attacks on Obama - he's just a celebrity, he's after your skinny blonde white women, he's a rootless carpetbagger - is on any rational analysis, they each apply far more strongly to McCain. But I guess that's just another page of the Rove playbook - attack your opponent for your own faults.

[kharris]

ChrisP,

Perhaps the professor's complaint is that this is all just in the mind of David Brooks. It is Brooks' stock in trade to declare that we are a certain way, want a certain thing, feel a certain feeling, without one jot of evidence. It's the Brooks set-up. Everything about this piece is the world according to Brooks. To the extent that he draws on reality at all, it is as a starting point from which he reshapes the result to suit his argument. If Obama is the man that Brooks describes, it is purest accident. Brooks doesn't care whether Obama is the man he discribes, because Brooks' intent is to make a point about Obama that serves Brook's own purpose.

In short, the guy just makes stuff up. Every day. All the time. I keep going back to his oh, so technical and cock-sure description of the physics of geosynchronous orbit, which just happened to be completely wrong. It is so much his habit to say whatever comes into his head that it apparently never occured to him to find out anything about the physics of geosynchronos orbit before writing about it.

There may be terrible problems with Barack Obama, but if so, there is no hope that anything you read by David Brooks would actually identify what's wrong with Obama, because Brooks could not possibly know and certainly doesn't care.

[piotr]

The most damming is the evidence that the guy could not even develop roots in the law school he was teaching.

Law schools are famous for their esprit de corp, fraternal spirit binding all involved, from administration, to professors and students, even janitorial staff. And yet, Obama stood apart

Actually, I have no idea what sins Obama could be guilty of. Wrong neckties? No neckties? Living in Hyde Park, next to the school, rather than commuting, liko most professors?

Where is Medium Lobster when we need [that entity]? Ineluctably embedded in roots and values. Or is it roots and berries that bears ineluctably eat every fall?

[bigTom]

I see David as having caught the political mood of the week. Obama has too many outstanding qualities, which translates into we must resent him, for his gifts, and because he cannot understand our own struggles. They are trying to set up a selection criteria for president which only allows the most average person through. The candidate can't be of more than average intelligence, because we would then resent him. He must be the most average of all people, otherwise ordinary people can't identify with him.

This all seems absurd. But their candidate doesn't really have any outstanding features, other than an interesting bio. Changing the job description to be "must be incredibly like an average Joe", is their way of rigging the contest.

[John Markesan]

Are you all saying that confidence in someone's demonstrated loyalty to something (ideas, employers, people, systems of government) is unimportant?

I don't like Brooks, but I sensed he was trying in his lame-brained way to get at something that also bothers me about Obama--whose campaign for Senate I supported heartily when I was in Chicago, and would stand my left/progressive credentials up to anybody's.

The man reminds me of helium...

[Now that's just total bullshit. My ex-roommate Ron Loui says that's bullshit--and he went to high school with Obama. My sister-in-law Michelle Jacobs says that's bullshit--and she took all her first-year law school classes with him. My friend from college Rachel Klayman says that's bullshit--and she edited his second book.

Please stop with the bullshit.]

[Retrogrouch]

Murray Bowles: "In the world but not of it" -- didn't St Paul claim that was a Good Thing?

Yes, Paul said that.

But the meme being perpetrated by the McCain camp is this: Obama claims he is the messiah, and only the anti-christ would make such a blasphemous claim. This is akin to the McCain "The One" ad which also attempts to portray Obama as claiming to be divine.

To people not in tune with evangelical thought, this seems rediculous. In FACT it is. But McCain, cynically, does not care. His only goal here is to sway the evangelical vote by falsely claiming that Obama is blaspheming here. It's just one step up the ladder from the "Uppity" meme the McCain camp is aiming at the redneck vote.

Brooks isn't stupid, he's just corrupt. Using the in/of metaphor is quite strained and makes no sense outside of this dog-whistle code word coordinated attack. It is evidence that he is coordinating his articles with the McCain campaign, most likely at the direction of Steve Schmidt.

[Michael Drake]

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is not just. (Actually, God just is not. Oh well; same difference.)

[Tuco]

Death by a thousand cuts. The Rethugs control the media, have the hacks and will stay on negative message.

That Obama, I don't know, there's just *something* I don't like or trust about that guy. I'm goin' with McCain.