David Brooks Gets Obama, America Right

Kudos to New York Times columnist David Brooks for helping to further catalyze the post-partisanship which the election of Barack Obama represents for some.  Brooks, a moderate conservative, recently wrote a column called, "Getting Obama Right" where he even-handedly castigates partisan portrayals of the President from both sides.  From the right:

Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal. He plays by ruthless, Chicago politics rules. He is arrogant toward foes, condescending toward allies and runs a partisan political machine. 

From the left:

Obama is an inspiring but overly intellectual leader who has trouble making up his mind and fighting for his positions. He has not defined a clear mission. He has allowed the Republicans to dominate debate. He is too quick to compromise and too cerebral to push things through.

The truth:

Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy — from his book “The Audacity of Hope” to his joint-session health care speech last September — he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market.

He has tried to find this balance in a town without an organized center — in a town in which liberals chair the main committees and small-government conservatives lead the opposition. He has tried to do it in a context maximally inhospitable to his aims.

But he has done it with tremendous tenacity. Readers of this column know that I’ve been critical on health care and other matters. Obama is four clicks to my left on most issues. He is inadequate on the greatest moral challenge of our day: the $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade. He has misread the country, imagining a hunger for federal activism that doesn’t exist. But he is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington.

Brooks diagnoses the problem:

We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.

In his master-slave dialectic, German Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel describes a meeting of two prototypical self-conscious beings: a struggle to the death ensues; since self is defined only in terms of the other, the individual who least fears death becomes the master, and the weaker individual consents to be the slave.  As well as having influenced thinkers from Karl Marx to J.J. Abrams with its myriad interpretations, the master-slave dialectic serves as a parable for American politics: too many Americans think of politics as this endless struggle between good (ourselves and the like-minded) and evil (people with other opinions), and are unwilling to see politics beyond the Aufhebung of liberal and conservative - that is, they cannot see the true purpose of politics as a means to solve common problems.  These people define themselves in terms of what they perceive as their own polar opposite.  If there were no "conservatives" to oppose, there would be no "liberals," and vice-versa.  The death of partisanship threatens to destroy the political selves of the vast majority of this country's citizens, and certainly the majority of cable news personalities.  

Rising above this persistently malignant two-headed, bi-partisan monster is what the Presidency of Barack Obama is all about, whether one agrees with him or not.  It's nice to hear Brooks - very much in disagreement with Obama politically - call shenanigans and take the red pill.