Matt Yglesias

Is Patio Man a Neo-Hooverite?

I found today’s David Brooks column extremely confusing on a number of levels. For one thing, I’m unclear on who “Patio Man” is since patios or patio-like spaces are an extremely common feature of the American landscape — existing in rural areas, suburbs of all kinds, but also many urban neighborhoods. Brooks says that he “is the quintessential suburban American, the service economy worker, the guy who wears khakis to work each day, with the security badge on the belt clip around his waist” and also that he “lives in northern Virginia, along the I-4 corridor near Orlando, Fla., in or near Columbus, Ohio, along the Front Range of Colorado, in the converging megalopolis between Albuquerque and Santa Fe and in many other places.” Demographically, those places don’t have a great deal in common — northern Virginia much wealthier than Columbus, etc.

But the basic idea seems to be that Patio Man is a white male suburbanite. Then Brooks says:

In times of turmoil, he has gravitated toward the party that could restore his sense of order. In the 1970s, crime and social breakdown seemed like the biggest threats to order, and he gravitated to the G.O.P. In the late 1990s, Republican revolutionaries seemed to bring instability, and he softened on Clinton. Then terrorism threatened his equilibrium and he helped re-elect Bush. Then, post-Iraq and post-Katrina, administrative incompetence led him a bit the other way.

It’s probably true that white male suburbanites shifted to some extent throughout all these events, but at the same time one has to keep in mind that white male suburbanites are just much more conservative than are non-white males or white males who live in big cities or white women. Bill Clinton won the 1996 election pretty handily, but Dole won white men by a very safe 49-38 margin. In that context, it’s hard to know how we’re supposed to think about this:

Patio Man wants change. But this is no time for more risk or more debt. Debt in the future is no solution to the debt racked up in the past. This is a back-to-basics moment, a return to safety and the fundamentals.

Patio Man, in other words, would prefer it if President Obama come into office in 2009 and govern in a relatively conservative manner. But this is just another way of observing that Patio man is a conservative. Most likely, Obama will win the election. But I’m absolutely positive that most white male suburbanites will vote for John McCain. And if Obama becomes President, most white male suburbanites won’t approve of his job performance. And most white male suburbanites definitely won’t vote for his re-election. But by the same token, non-whites definitely will vote for Obama in 2008 and if he wins they’ll do it again in 2012.

Meanwhile, the real point here seems to be that Brooks thinks it would be a mistake for the federal government to take on additional debt. But Brooks is wrong. You don’t need to take my word for it, or even listen to Brooks’ colleague the Nobel Prize winning economist — everyone from Ben Bernanke to Maya MacGuinneas is rejecting neo-Hooverism. As for the public at large, I seriously doubt that most people have a considered opinion on the merits of Keynesian stimulus. What I do know is that the electorate as a whole will react very poorly to the United States falling into a severe, years-long economic slump while they’ll reward a reasonably hasty turnaround. Smart politicians are going to do what it takes to avoid a severe slump and trust the public to judge them based on results.

The Trouble With Character

David Brooks was very high on Barack Obama for a while. Then he got very upset at Obama for a while, slamming him as “Fast Eddie Obama.” Now he’s back to mostly praise:

He doesn’t have F.D.R.’s joyful nature or Reagan’s happy outlook, but he is analytical. That’s why this William Ayers business doesn’t stick. He may be liberal, but he is never wild. His family is bourgeois. His instinct is to flee the revolutionary gesture in favor of the six-point plan.

This was not evident back in the “fierce urgency of now” days, but it is now. And it is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. He would be untroubled by self-destructive demons or indiscipline. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather — already has gathered — some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem.

I just wonder about this approach to thinking about politicians. Suppose Obama really is “Fast Eddie” and the main difference between now and when Brooks didn’t like him is that he’s gotten better at lying? After all, Brooks says that key elements of Obama’s character were “not evident back in the ‘fierce urgency of now’ days” but now they are. But maybe “Fast Eddie” is just turning it on and off to suit his schemes. I feel pretty confident as a well-informed, skeptical person with Google at my finger tips that I can figure out when politicians are lying to me about policy or about their records. But a lot of this genre of punditry seems based on the idea that journalists can discern when politicians are and aren’t misleading with their presentation of self. But I have no reason to believe I’m especially good at this, and plenty of reason to believe that big-time politicians are unusually good at misleading about this sort of thing. There’s something to be said for just analyzing politics as a rigid ideologue and not trying to wade into these waters at all.

The Chairmen

David Brooks offers a variety of reasons to think that we’re in for a new era of big government liberalism. I agree with most of his points, but I’m less sure about this:

Obama will try to straddle the two camps [i.e., liberals and moderates] — he seems to sympathize with both sides — but the liberals will win. Over the past decade, liberals have mounted a campaign against Robert Rubin-style economic policies, and they control the Congressional power centers. Even if he’s so inclined, it’s difficult for a president to overrule the committee chairmen of his own party. It is more difficult to do that when the president is a Washington novice and the chairmen are skilled political hands. It is most difficult when the president has no record of confronting his own party elders. It’s completely impossible when the economy is in a steep recession, and an air of economic crisis pervades the nation.

Do liberals really control the power centers? According to the DW-NOMINATE rankings, the most conservative House Democrat is Rep. Barrow of Georgia, the 235th most liberal member of the House. South Carolina’s John Spratt chairs the Budget Committee and he’s in a tie at slot 187.5 while Charlie Rangel from the Ways and Means Committee is in a eight-way tie at 94.5. On the Senate side, Kent Conrad chairs the Senate Budget Committee and he’s the 40th most liberal Senator. Max Baucus chairs the Senate Finance Commitee and he’s the 48th most liberal senator.

On that metric, at least, moderates seem firmly in control of the key “power centers.” We have very liberal members chairing some committees, but of the four chairs holding the key budgetary levers, three are clearly moderates and Rangel’s about in the middle of the caucus.

Brooks: House ‘Wingers Are Destroying the GOP

David Brooks is not a happy camper:

House Republicans led the way and will get most of the blame. It has been interesting to watch them on their single-minded mission to destroy the Republican Party. Not long ago, they led an anti-immigration crusade that drove away Hispanic support. Then, too, they listened to the loudest and angriest voices in their party, oblivious to the complicated anxieties that lurk in most American minds.

Now they have once again confused talk radio with reality. If this economy slides, they will go down in history as the Smoot-Hawleys of the 21st century. With this vote, they’ve taken responsibility for this economy, and they will be held accountable. The short-term blows will fall on John McCain, the long-term stress on the existence of the G.O.P. as we know it.

This is noteworthy, though I think a little naive of Brooks. The House conservatives who sank the bailout didn’t do so because they were listening to loud and angry voices. They sank the plan by accident. They were trying to double-cross the Democrats. First, they wrung lots of concessions out of Democrats at the negotiating table as the price for delivering 80 votes. Then, by not delivering 80 votes and forcing Pelosi to pass the bill as a partisan Democratic bill, they were going to wage a demagogic anti-bailout campaign. But Pelosi refused to be played for a sucker and so the conservative inadvertently sank a bill that, all evidence suggests, they actually wanted to pass. They just wanted to vote “no” on it for short-term political gain.

It’s the Institutions, Stupid

Yesterday’s David Brooks column contained a putative contrast between Barack Obama as a champion of “policy change” that’s responsible but dull, and John McCain who “is the champion of systemic change — after two decades of bickering and self-dealing, its time to shake up the whole system in order to get things done.” What does that mean? Brooks doesn’t know, he just says that “McCain promise of change is comprehensive and vehement, though it’s hard to know how it would actually work in office.” Brendan Nyhan is justifiably confused by this and countersthat “in reality, the way ‘policy change’ and ’systemic change’ typically happen is that the party in control of the presidency changes or the balance of power shifts in Congress.”

That’s true. I would add, though, that I think people should point out that it would be possible, in theory, to actually change the institutions of American politics. In the United States we do this very strange thing where almost every successful politician of either party and almost every pundit has a habit of complaining about gridlock, observing that Washington is broken, and other sundry clichés. And they’re right — we have a set of political institutions that were designed a very long time ago by men who, while intelligent, didn’t share modern values, didn’t have the benefit of observing different democratic political systems in operation, and had no sense of the challenges of modern politics. But at the same time as all this complaining about our broken system, the constitutional order that constitutes the broken system is revered. If, as a country, we really wanted to “change Washington” we could do what the Founders did, decide to scrap the whole thing, elect delegates to a big convention, and write a new one.

Now that’s not going to happen. But smaller institutional changes could be undertaken. Back during the primaries, a lot of liberals criticized Barack Obama for focusing too much on process and not enough on substance. If anything, I thought the problem was just that he didn’t go far enough. Periods of substantive change in American politics have often been associated with real procedural changes in the operations of government. Not “bringing people together” or “changing the culture of blah blah” but, say, actual shifts to curb the use of the filibuster and the power of committee chairs. Those were good ideas when they were done in the 1960s and 1970s, and it would make sense to keep moving in that direction. The prospects for major health care reform or climate change legislation would look very different if it took 50 Senators (plus the Vice President) to pass a bill rather than 60. This stuff is hugely important, and yet nobody talks about it.

More Brooks Elaborations Needed

Today, David Brooks: “The Republicans are intellectually unfit to govern right now . . .”

This follows on last week’s Brooks: “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.”

The arguments he’s making in both of those columns are interesting, but I wish he would elaborate a bit on these particular points that he’s kind of tossing off. If prominent conservatives think Republicans are intellectually unfit to govern and the party lacks experts, that seems noteworthy — not just something you should mention offhand to support a larger thesis.

Brooks: McCain is an Unprincipled Sellout

I’m not sure I’ve ever really understood the progressive blogosphere convention that everything David Brooks writes must be read in the most ungenerous way possible. Certainly, though, if you apply that method to Brooks’ column from yesterday the widespread derision with which it was greeted on liberal blogs is warranted. But I thought it was a pretty good column. Recall that Brooks has historically been a big McCain fan. Back during the 2000 campaign, he was one of the relatively small number of decidedly conservative journalists to fall for McMania. And while lots of writers have gushed with praise for McCain over the years, Brooks was something more like an important ideologist of McCainism, someone who both praised McCain and also helped shape the higher rationale for his political ambitions. McCain, Brooks thought, was an ideal political vessel for ideas that Brooks thought were important. Brooks thought, in other words, that McCain was substantially different from and better than your average politician.

Brooks’ column from yesterday, meanwhile, is about how Brooks no longer thinks that’s true. It argues that McCain, like everyone else, turns out to be happy to put his personal ambition ahead of his ideals and principles. And it argues that McCain doesn’t have any special qualities whereby his ambition is best served through honorable methods. He’s a typical pol pulling the typical stuff. Now if you’re a conservative, as Brooks is, you’re still going to look at the situation and decide that in a Presidential election you should vote for the conservative candidate — typical pol though he may be. But the main theme of McCain campaign is that he isn’t like that that he “puts country first” as witnessed by his wartime service — we’re supposed to believe that he’s a much, much, much better and more elevated kind of political leader than your average politician. And Brooks is saying that’s not true. He’s not saying it the way I would say it, but I think it’s all the more valuable for coming from a conservative McCain fan and for being written with the “more in sadness than in anger” tone you would expect from a conservative McCain fan.