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The election of Barack Obama as its next president has brought the United States to the end of a series of eras and the beginning of a series of pivots, said David Brooks, New York Times columnist and commentator for “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.”
Those shifts involve changing attitudes toward race, the end of an economic boom, the transfer of power to the post-Baby Boom generation, and the end of conservative political dominance, Brooks said during a Myron Scholes Global Market Forum, sponsored by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Initiative on Global Markets, at Gleacher Center on December 3.
“I got to see the conservative movement from the 1980s until the end,” he said. “If you’re interested in ideas at all, it was an inspiring thing to be a part of. It ran its course. It had some victories; it had some defeats. In the last 10 years, there were a lot fewer oddballs in the conservative movement and a lot more sleazeballs. It became intellectually less vibrant. Blogs replaced books, culture replaced William F. Buckley, and Rush Limbaugh replaced John Burnham. It ran out of ideas.”
In politics, relationships and personalities matter most of all, Brooks said. The “mental landscape” of a candidate matters more than campaign promises, he said. So far Obama has demonstrated tremendous perceptiveness, intellectual depth, and pervasive calmness within his team, Brooks said.
Obama’s downsides are that he was a poor senator who was not present for the difficult work needed to do the job well, the “sojourner nature” of his political ambition, and his incredible self-confidence, Brooks said. His confidence has helped him pick an experienced, evidence-based transition team, but has created enormous potential for conflict within policy areas, he said.
“For example, he has appointed academic economists to head four different groups, each with exactly the same skill sets doing essentially the same job,” Brooks said. “Obama must think, ‘I can referee all this.’ It means he’s going to have to be involved in every single decision as those bodies compete. And he’s done exactly the same thing with foreign policy. You wouldn’t set yourself up for that, unless you thought you had a tremendous ability to do it.”
Obama faces a “weird, unprecedented problem” politically in which plenty has been proffered among economic scarcity, Brooks said. Government spending is rampant, despite horrible economic times, a deficit that could reach $750 billion next year or $1.5 trillion the following year, rising healthcare costs with an aging population, and funding promised to Medicare and entitlement programs, he said.
“We’re in scarcity with an economy heading south,” Brooks said. “At the same time we have now given ourselves psychological permission to spend $500 - $700 billion over the next few years in the stimulus package, on top of the money that’s been spent over the past year. Over the past few months in Washington, the language that was once used to talk about $3 billion is now used to talk about $300 billion. Spending $800 billion no longer seems like a big deal.”
With the failure of the conservative movement, results of the 2008 election could not have been worse for Republicans, he said. Although McCain received 46 percent of the popular vote, his party is now supported primarily by the shrinking portions of the electorate, Brooks said. All of the growing portions of the electorate – young people, Hispanics, and the college-educated — voted Democratic, he said.
“When young people vote for the same party three elections in a row, they tend to vote for the same party for the rest of their lives,” Brooks said. “There have now been two elections where young people have voted for Democrats. If there is a third, you can be pretty sure they’ll be Democrats for their entire lives.”
Conservative disdain for liberal intellectuals drifted into disdain for all intellectuals and an embrace of pseudo-populism and blue-collar posturing, he said. “On issue after issue there is a big debate within this country and both sides of the debate are within the Democratic Party,” Brooks said. “The Democrats have expanded outwardly intellectually, as well as politically.”
Phil Rockrohr