David Brooks, come on down!
David Brooks finally gets it. If the United States is a meritocracy based on reliable democratic beliefs which embraces its role in the world and knows that in these tumultuous times we need to lead, then Barack Obma is the only rational choice:
Obama has the great intellect. I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I’m getting nowhere with the interview, it’s late in the night, he’s on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he’s cranky. Out of the blue I say, ‘Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?’ And he says, ‘Yeah.’ So i say, ‘What did Niebuhr mean to you?’ For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.
And the other thing that does separate Obama from just a pure intellectual: he has tremendous powers of social perception. And this is why he’s a politician, not an academic. A couple of years ago, I was writing columns attacking the Republican congress for spending too much money. And I throw in a few sentences attacking the Democrats to make myself feel better. And one morning I get an email from Obama saying, ‘David, if you wanna attack us, fine, but you’re only throwing in those sentences to make yourself feel better.’ And it was a perfect description of what was going through my mind. And everybody who knows Obama all have these stories to tell about his capacity for social perception.
And that is what I think what lies at the core of the venomous anger we’ve seen stoked by McCain-Palin over the past week. They whipping up the lizard brains into a frenzy who are absolutely threatened with the prospect of an intelligent black man. I am just waiting for the n-word to be shouted out any hour.
Tags: david brooks, mccain, obama, Palin
