Ahh, the pundit-driven presidential boomlet. Every so often, a Washington prognosticator like David Brooks will latch on to an obscure figure--someone like the attractive, socially-conservative nonentity Senator John Thune--and extol his (or her) virtues to the heavens, explaining why only this person can redeem the party and become the next president. Admittedly, it sometimes works, but it's often just a passing fantasy.

The controversy over the "deem-and-pass" strategy will probably end very quickly. (I expect Democrats to conclude it's not worth the hassle.) But it's another telling episode in the health care saga. Conservatives have spent the last day in a fit of outrage at the prospect that House Democrats might enact the Senate health care bill and changes to it in one vote rather than two.

Today David Brooks has written the platonic ideal of a David Brooks column. It is in some sense the template for nearly every David Brooks column, but it captured the major elements so perfectly that it almost feels as if every previous David Brooks column has been an homage to this one.

It begins with an interesting little sociological ditty:

I think the "liberals say X," conservatives say Y," I'm the rational man in the middle" trope is overused by pundits and politicians. But in this case, I think David Brooks gets it right today:

David Gregory asks Nancy Ann-Deparle a good question:

This post may not hold a lot of interest to readers who aren't Ross Douthat, but what the heck, it's only the internet:

Ross Douthat has a generally decent reply to something I wrote a few days ago, pointing out the ways that highbrow and lowbrow conservative attacks have effectively worked in tandem:

David Brooks argued yesterday that President Obama's decision to postpone the excise tax means it will never go into effect:

If you read this blog, I assume you also read Jonathan Chait's. Just in case, though, you should read his response to David Brooks and Ross Douthat about the fate of the Cadillac tax and its implications for reform. These paragraphs, in particular, really capture the frustrating political dynamic we've seen for the last year:

--Matthew Yglesias puts former Rumsfeld speechwriter Marc Thiessen on the couch

--David Brooks likes Joe Biden

--The Democrats' bipartisan health care plan

--John McCain's primary challenge

Ramesh Ponnuru comments:

David Brooks, Jan. 9, 2009: "The conventional advice for presidents is: focus your energies on a few big things. Obama just blew the doors off that one. Maybe Obama can pull this off, but I have my worries. By this time next year, he’ll either be a great president or a broken one." Right now I'd say Obama is neither.

I've been railing at the establishment's insistence on acting as if voters are driven purely by ideological preference -- as if 10% unemployment has nothing to do with the current voter mood. Offering his rebuttal is David Brooks:

Ezra Klein expresses his skepticism that David Brooks' column, raging at the Democrats for even considering trying to pass a bill that lacks public support at the moment, is motivated by genuine belief in direct democracy, as opposed to pure expediency:

In 1949, a magazine called The Contemporary Jewish Record, now more or less Commentary, published an explosive essay called “Anti-Semitic Stereotypes in Zionism.” It was not at all an attack on Zionism.

--Jim Manzi is a much nicer guy than I am. I kind of feel bad about criticizing him. But he's still wrong.

--David Brooks, who is as wonderful a cultural critic as he is a mediocre political analyst, has a terrific take on Avatar.

--Right-wingers turn against power companies.

In his annual Sidney Awards, New York Times columnist David Brooks recognizes the best magazine essays.

In his Tuesday New York Times column earlier this week, David Brooks proposes what he calls a “bipartisan innovation agenda,” based on a September white paper from the president’s National Economic Council. Brooks is right to talk about innovation as a way to revive the nation’s sputtering economic engine. But his policy prescriptions don’t go far enough to spur innovation because they’re based on an overly market-oriented view of the economy: the idea that the market, if supplied with the right inputs and structured the right way, will produce all the innovation the nation needs. 

Brooks advocates some federal policies to increase the supply of what might be called “inputs to innovation,” such as educated workers, basic scientific research, and infrastructure. I won’t discuss the merits of his particular policy recommendations here, but the idea that we’ll get more innovation if we have more inputs to innovation is right—as far as it goes. Brooks supports other policies that are about improving the market environment for innovation, such as promoting more balanced trade between the U.S. and China, cutting the federal budget deficit, and lowering the corporate tax rate. Again, whether or not these particular suggestions are good ones, the idea that innovation requires a supportive market environment is also right—as far as it goes.

The problem is that overall these things don’t go far enough. Policies to boost inputs to innovation and create innovation-friendly markets would be enough to get us enough innovation only if the companies that actually do the innovation were the self-sufficient, perfectly informed, atomistic competitors of textbook economics. In the world of textbook economics, there’s no need for government to worry about how innovation actually takes place because the market will reward companies that somehow figure out innovations that add value and punish companies that don’t keep up.

Efficiency versus equity. Risk versus predictability. Vitality versus security. The dichotomy goes by different names in different contexts, but it's basically the same idea. We can have a society that grows quickly but unevenly, or we can have one that grows more slowly but with more similar benefits for everybody.

It's an idea that seems true enough in the extreme and, quite possibly, it is true more often than it is false. But is it true when it comes to health care reform?

David Brooks thinks so. Writing in the New York Times yesterday, he suggested that the debate over health care has come down to a choice over values:

In the real world, there’s usually a trade-off. The unregulated market wants to direct capital to the productive and the young. Welfare policies usually direct resources to the vulnerable and the elderly. Most social welfare legislation, even successful legislation, siphons money from the former to the latter. ...

Early in this health care reform process, many of us thought we were in that magical sweet spot. We could extend coverage to the uninsured but also improve the system overall to lower costs. That is, we thought it would be possible to reduce the suffering of the vulnerable while simultaneously squeezing money out of the wasteful system and freeing it up for more productive uses. ...

It hasn’t worked out that way. The bills before Congress would almost certainly ease the anxiety of the uninsured, those who watch with terror as their child or spouse grows ill, who face bankruptcy and ruin. ...

But, alas, there would be trade-offs. Instead of reducing costs, the bills in Congress would probably raise them. They would mean that more of the nation’s wealth would be siphoned off from productive uses and shifted into a still wasteful health care system. ...

Reform would make us a more decent society, but also a less vibrant one. It would ease the anxiety of millions at the cost of future growth. It would heal a wound in the social fabric while piling another expensive and untouchable promise on top of the many such promises we’ve already made. America would be a less youthful, ragged and unforgiving nation, and a more middle-aged, civilized and sedate one.

The argument here is worth debating, not least because Brooks has grappled with the health care issue honestly and thoughtfully over the last few months.

When he says "many of us thought" health care reform could control costs even as it expanded coverage, he's being quite literal. He's been an enthusiastic supporter of efforts to control costs and repeatedly urged fellow conservatives to engage in this issue seriously. He is, in short, as good a proxy for sensible right-of-center thinking as you can find in the political universe today.

But in this particular case, I think, Brooks' analysis is off--both in the narrow, technical sense and the broader, philosophical one.

I think David Brooks's column about John Thune on Friday tells us a lot about the debate over the GOP's future. Brooks, of course, has been a leading (and compelling) reformist voice for years now. Here's how he summarized the reform agenda in a column just after the 2008 election:

The other camp, the Reformers, argue that the old G.O.P. priorities were fine for the 1970s but need to be modernized for new conditions. The reformers tend to believe that American voters will not support a party whose main idea is slashing government. The Reformers propose new policies to address inequality and middle-class economic anxiety. They tend to take global warming seriously. They tend to be intrigued by the way David Cameron has modernized the British Conservative Party.

Brooks lamented the likelihood that Republicans would double down on traditionalism rather than update their philosophy.

In a similar vein, he's also warned against cosmetic makeovers that don't fundamentally reimagine Republicanism. Here, for example, is what he wrote about the flaws of the McCain campaign:

Some of us hoped that by reforming his party, which has grown so unpopular, McCain could prove that he could reform the country.

But McCain never ... articulated a governing philosophy ... [The McCain campaign] was all biography, which was necessary, but it did not clearly point to a new direction for the party or the country.

Which is why it's a little jarring to see Brooks tout Thune so lustily. Thune seems to embody most of what Brooks criticized about the Republican Party several months ago. Only now he singles out these attributes for praise. To wit:

So yesterday I posted an item complaining about the line of argument that attributes Tuesday's election results to the fact that Democrats had strayed too far from the center, had done too much to quickly, were expanding government too far, etc., etc. I argued that it was much more plausible that voters--particularly the independent voters who decide elections--were just pissed off about the economy. To believe the former, you'd have to believe that these voters have well worked-out views about the proper size of government, and that they're supremely self-aware about where they stand on the ideological spectrum, and where politicians stand relative to them at any given moment, which strikes me as a bit implausible.

Alas, today David Brooks basically takes the too-far-from-the-center argument and runs with it. It's as though he read my post and tried to construct a column that came to the precise opposite conclusion on every point. (Though, as long as we're on the subject of implausibility, let me point out that that's fantastically implausible.)

Brooks and I agree that Democrats took a real drubbing among independents Tuesday. (It would be hard to disagree--the numbers are the numbers.) And we both agree that the economy was a major factor. As Brooks reports:

Richard Yeselson is a research coordinator for the labor federation, Change to Win. The opinions he expresses are his own.

--David Runciman's fascinating essay on the social and political consequences of inequality

--William Deresiewicz's review of Margaret Atwood (Deresiewicz's fantastic piece on Jonathan Lethem in this week's TNR is here).

David Brooks has been saying sensible things about health care for a while now. He has expressed what seems like a sincere interest in reforming the health care system. He has also demonstrate a substantive grasp of the issues that goes beyond what most observers seem to have, the kind you can get only if you take the issue seriously.

To be sure, we don't exactly see things the same way. He seems far less interested in expanding coverage for its own sake than I do. He's also far more distrusting of government intervention.  But, as Brooks writes today in his New York Times column, that divide shouldn't prevent conservatives and liberals from working together--since there are, after all, ways to address both problems simultaneously, if not always to either side's satisfaction.

Although Brooks has said these things before, the timing is important. In the last few weeks and particularly in the last few days, a number of prominent conservative and Republican voices have spoken out on the importance of health care reform, even if that means working with the Democrats on the bills moving through Congress: Michael Bloomberg, Bob Dole, Bill Frist, Mark McClellan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tommy Thompson. None offered unambiguous endorsements of Democratic reforms and, in Frist's case, the statement of support was all but withdrawn a day later. Still, the signal coming from these people is unmistakable: It's time for the Republicans to do something more than obstruct.

David Brooks' has an interesting column today on the place of right-wing commentators in the conservative universe. Brooks thinks that the impact of Limbaugh et. al. has been vastly overtstated. He writes:

It's been a big week for anti-anti-racism.  Virtually the entire conservative world has waxed indignant about Jimmy Carter's suggestion that racism is responsible for the unusual virulence of anti-Obama sentiment. 

Listening to it all, you'd think the so-called "race card" was a much bigger problem in American society than racism itself, and that does seem to be what a lot of conservatives think.  But it's getting to the point where the argument seems to be that if anti-Obama protesters have any non-racial motives for their behavior, then mentioning race as any sort of factor (hard to avoid given the revival of screaming about "welfare" and the preoccupation with the marginal organzing group ACORN) is a terrible insult.