Bill Kristol and David Brooks
If you want to know where the US is as a political entity in 2008, do not looks to the polls, nor election bickering. Look to the conservative commentators. There is a gap emerging between those who once made up the party of ideas (mostly bad ones) and those who have an idea of where the party lost its footing. One segment of the Republican Party looks at the current situation and says, “Something is wrong, but we are best equipped to fix it.” Then there is the Bill Kristol wing, which says, “Things are great, you’re just too dumb and poor to realize it.”
The David Brooks-George Will-Andrew Sullivan types realize that something is amiss. These are hard-core Republicans. You remember the party built on fiscal discipline, and not on hating gays and immigrants. These real GOPers are willing to admit that nation building and massive deficits predicated on lack of spending restraint are not conservative values. For years the GOP was able to hang its hat on being the party of big ideas. True, some of these ideas included invading countries in the Middle East without a game plan, but at least they were ideas.
The Republican Party cannot even offer any ideas now, and Bill Kristol is so blind in his politics–or so lazy in his thinking–that he fails to understand it. Just this week he wrote an article about how great things have been under George W Bush. The problem is that most people are too stupid or poor to understand it.
This is the conventional GOP response to concerns about Bush’s low approval rating: 2008 won’t be about Bush. He’s not running for reelection. Nor is his vice president. And the leading GOP candidates have a very limited association with the Bush administration. What’s more, 2006, an off-year election, was a retrospective verdict on Iraq and Katrina. This year’s election will be forward-looking. Rahm Emanuel can repeat all he wants that “George Bush is on the ballot in 2008.” But that’s just Democratic spin.
That’s what most Republicans are saying. But the truth is that Emanuel isn’t all wrong: It is important to Republican prospects in 2008, and to conservative prospects beyond, how the Bush administration is judged. Continued progress in Iraq is paramount. That’s all the more reason not to risk the progress produced by the surge by prematurely drawing down American troops. Stabilizing the situation in Afghanistan is a priority, too. On other fronts, the administration, unfortunately, seems determined to drift with respect to North Korea and Iran. Meanwhile it is engaged in wishful thinking with respect to Russia and the Palestinian question. Absent a crisis, it may be that all conservatives can do is mitigate the damage–and focus on making sure Iraq and Afghanistan are in reasonably good shape.
So if I read that correctly, not much progress can be made with Iran, North Korea, Russia, or Palestine (sorry, the ‘Palestinian question.”) On the other hand, Iraq has the potential to be the best thing from the Bush years. That analysis could be chalked up to reality, since the last seven years have not exactly been fun and games. However, he cites Jules Crittenden and ‘his excellent eponymous blog’ to demonstrate that, well, people just don’t get it. I’ll assume his glowing endorsement means he agrees with this analysis:
Maybe they’re afraid someone will notice we’re winning in Iraq, America hasn’t been attacked again, Katrina had more to do with inept Democratic leadership in Louisiana than it did with inept Republican leadership in Washington . . . we’ve had decent job growth and it isn’t likely to be much of a recession. . . . I’m sure I missed a few, but it’s been a long 7 years.
First, we did not have a major (i.e.- more than seven casualties) attack on American soil before 9-11. So…way to go! You only had the worst attack on American soil occur once on your watch! Go team.
Second, Katrina was about poor Democratic leadership? I seem to remember things differently. In fact let me conjure up my memory bank of how Bush talked about the worst disaster response in the history of catastrophes, and keep in mind this was while the streets of New Orleans were flooding and people were dying in their homes:
I hate to tell Bill Kristol this, but just because a Republican calls someone ‘Brownie,’ it doesn’t mean they’re a Democrat.
Now let me get to David Brooks, of whom I am no big fan. However, he is smart enough, and not-too-indoctrinated, to see that the GOP is rudderless. Bill Kristol supported Fred Thompson. If that doesn’t tell you where the neo-cons are, nothing will. David Brooks, while he will surely never endorse Obama or any Democrat, has his eyes open wide enough to see that something is happening:
How could the septuagenarian Kennedy cast the younger Clintons into the past? He could do it because he evoked the New Frontier, which again seems fresh. He could do it because he himself has come to live a life of service.
After his callow youth, Kennedy came to realize that life would not give him the chance to be president. But life did ask him to be a senator, and he has embraced that role and served that institution with more distinction than anyone else now living — as any of his colleagues, Republican or Democrat, will tell you. And he could do it because culture really does have rhythms. The respect for institutions that was prevalent during the early ’60s is prevalent with the young again today. The earnest industriousness that was common then is back today. The awareness that we are not self-made individualists, free to be you and me, but emerge as parts of networks, webs and communities; that awareness is back again today.
Sept. 11th really did leave a residue — an unconsummated desire for sacrifice and service. The old Clintonian style of politics clashes with that desire. When Sidney Blumenthal expresses the Clinton creed by telling George Packer of The New Yorker, “It’s not a question of transcending partisanship. It’s a question of fulfilling it,” that clashes with the desire as well.
It’s not clear how far this altered public mood will carry Obama in this election. But there was something important and memorable about the way the 75-year-old Kennedy communed and bonded with a rapturous crowd half a century his junior.
It’s almost like these two guys are living in totally different universes. Kristol looks around and see the overwhelming success of the Bush administration–something the rest of us are too foolish to comprehend. Brooks understands that Bush has not lived up to his perceived hope.
Yet he also sees Kennedy handing off the torch to Obama. And let me tell you something: David Brooks likes the policies of neither Ted Kennedy, nor Senator Obama. But he’s smart enough to see that the moment is bigger than a tiny world viewpoint that tries to justify an unjust war via a too-late military surge. Kristol looks toward a ‘victory’ in Iraq, implying that somehow the situation will be appreciably better than when we arrived. He can only see the nose in front of him, but not the concrete wall closing in.
And so this is where the Republican Party stands. On the one hand you have the blind looking for any way to submit to dogma. And on the other you have those who are thoughtful, even if they are wrong on some of the fundamental issues of the day. Some people have too much invested in being right seven years ago to look to a promising future.
Of course, there’s always the other wing of the conservative party: PJ O’Rourke. But the wing with a sense of humor appears to be one-man deep.
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Janus responds:
Posted: January 30th, 2008 at 12:20 pm →
There is a pop-sociology book that discusses what you touched on in more detail…the idea that generations are cyclical, and the Gen-Y/mini-baby-boom/millennial generation is the generation to pick up the mantle of the next Greatest Generation–with the faith in institutions and earnest industriousness that you mentioned.
Like any such work, it is rife with generalizations and sophistry…but the core message of the book is spot on…at least I hope it is, for all our sakes.
I think the book is called “the next greatest generation.” Check it out.