Sep 2nd, 2008 at 11:44 am
Brooks:
I wish David Brooks would elaborate on this: “There simply aren’t enough Republican experts left to staff an administration, so he will have to throw together a hodgepodge with independents and Democrats.”
It’s a provocative claim, but I’m not entirely sure what he means by it.
37 Responses to “Brooks:”
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September 2nd, 2008 at 11:50 am
Um yeah, that is curious. One would think if there weren’t enough Republican experts to staff an administration, Bush would have already been forced to throw together this hypothetical hodgepodge. I suspect Brooks is making the rookie mistake of believing that McCain actually wants different experts than Bush.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:52 am
Don’t be dense. He means that it’s OK to vote for McCain because the effect of a vote for McCain will necessarily be the same effect as voting for a Democrat. (Except he’s white and a war hero!) The point of the column is to separate McCain from the tarnished Republican brand (and to associate him with the Democratic band).
It’s not like we haven’t seen this already from the campaign. Didn’t McCain run an ad claiming we are worse off than we were four years ago?
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:55 am
Uhhh… since when do you need “experts” to staff an administration? Was Michael Brown an expert at emergency management?
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:57 am
brooks must mean that experts are by definition knowledgeable about facts and exist in the reality based community making their existence incompatable with republican loyalty. either that or that all the other republican experts will work only for big business and not for the usa.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:08 pm
“One would think if there weren’t enough Republican experts to staff an administration, Bush would have already been forced to throw together this hypothetical hodgepodge.”
This assumes Bush wanted to or did staff his administration with experts. An assumption rather easily disproven.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:08 pm
There’s possibly also the assumption that those people for whom the phrase ‘Republican expert’ is not an oxymoron have already a) jumped ship to the private sector; b) changed party; c) both.
He does have his blog thing to explain this stuff, though.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:09 pm
What the other guys said about it being a valid, if very risky, move in real poker. It’s all about building an image.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:13 pm
It seems a good time for someone with ‘access’ to ask McCain why he is a Republican.
The very traditional cronyism of the W years threw the chattering class for a loop, probably because they’d never seen it in their lifetimes (so it never existed). They could scratch their heads and actually wonder how Brownie got the job at FEMA, for example. Brooks may be making a somewhat doltish assumption that any backslide from naked spoils-ism will require compromise and coalitions, but I suspect SomeCallMeTim is more right: Brooks is baiting independents and Democrats with more ‘they’re really the same’ yak.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Brooks surely means that the Republican brand is so trashed and lacking in confidence and ideas that, with a solidly Democratic Congress he will have no realistic option other than to take in Democrats if he wants administration that is going to do anything. Above, folks have pointed to the current administration: exactly! What has the current administration been able to achieve recently (think of the immigration bill that got McCain into so much trouble). A McCain administration would truly be Bush III in almost every way.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:19 pm
I think the key is that Brooks is broadcasting live from the planet Nebulon VI these days–one of those “parallel Earth” worlds like in the old Star Trek series, where people look like us, only the planet’s history took some strange turn so the Roman Empire still exists or whatever.
From reading Brooks, I find the key differences between Earth and Nebulon VI include:
–The Nebulon VI Palin “gets up in the morning to root out corruption,” and made a “mortal enemy” of Ted Stevens. The Earth Palin used to run Stevens’ 527 group and was endorsed by him for governor two years ago.
–The Nebulon VI McCain had not a single thought of identity politics in picking Palin for his veep; he picked her “because she seems so much like himself.”
–The Nebulon VI McCain is motivated by “virtue” versus “narrow self-interest.” The Earth McCain left his injured wife to marry a 100-million dollar fortune, got caught up in the Keating Five, and wrote campaign finance laws that make it easier for millionaires like him to self-finance campaigns, harder for everyone else.
–On Nebulon VI, the Palin pick may also doom the McCain candidacy, but only because it was a moment of crystaline moral purity, which is certain to be shattered in that rough and fallen world. McCain is just too good for them. On Earth, McCain is a cranky, angry, petulant man with too much temper and too little foresight, who just chucked his own best arguments out the window.
Those are the key differences as I see them. I may be able to find more if Brooks keeps reporting from Nebulon VI.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Why is there a dearth of Republican experts? Surely the Bush Administration and the Republican party have decided not to use any of them during the past five years, but that can’t mean they don’t exist. I’m sure some guys in Georgia will be able to turn up with a frozen body of a elusive “Republican expert” any day now.
http://thesebastards.blogspot.com/
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:06 pm
this is nonsense. there are surely plenty on half-term Governors and Lt Governors out there who are more than qualified to staff a Presidential administration. if not, there are certainly enough small-town mayors who could step up.
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:24 pm
It means that when it comes time to rebuild America’s financial system after it collapses under its own weight, McCain’ll hire a 24 year old with a culinary arts degree and connections to the Heritage Foundation to rebuild the New York Stock Exchange.
It worked in Baghdad, right?
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Jesus Christ! Did Brooks miss the part where the federal bureaucracy was purged of experts and replaced with political hacks?
There are no Republican experts because Abramoff’s 1981 Young Republicans all run the party, AND THEY’RE FUCKING BROWNSHIRTS. When a party’s platform consists only of “we want power”, they’ll only create expertise at gaining power.
Here’s what’s motherfucking scary: to be an expert, you need experience. If McCain wins, the government will continue to be run by hacks. After 16 years of bad-faith kleptocracy, there will be no AMERICAN experts, let alone Republican experts. We’ll have Sarah Palin on the right, and Matt Yglesias on the left–people with decent ideas, but no experience implementing said ideas.
Bush is Caligula; McCain is Nero.
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:04 pm
I think ‘Ole Dave needs to do some Palin vetting of his own…
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:28 pm
It’s just Brooks recycling the meme used for Bush: now that X has occurred he will move to the middle (yad, yada, yada.) There is not a chance that any Democrat will be asked to serve in a McCain administration. The base won’t allow it. IMO Brooks is just being a good soldier instead of a doofus (sorry to use the Rovian.)
September 2nd, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Brooks thinks McCain is a Maverick. He makes the same mistake about himself. So he likes the idea that McCain will pick qualified people from allover the spectrum and have a high merit, low partisanship administration.
September 2nd, 2008 at 5:35 pm
I’m not entirely sure what he means by it.
He means that McCain, unlike Obama, would be a truly bipartisan, centrist president.
Let the healing begin.
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:34 pm
I had a friend who interned for McCain. He said that basically all of the low level people who worked for McCain were Democrats, although I’m sure that’s not true anymore.
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:42 pm
What he means is that the Republican rejection of rationality and science and embrace of the irrational and revelatory has depleted the reserves of people who actually can run a modern state.
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