Independents, who are the largest group in the electorate, don't have any of this. They don't have institutional affiliations. They don't look to certain activist lobbies for guidance. There aren't many commentators who come from an independent perspective.

If he's talking about centrists, it doesn't make much sense; actually, middle-of-the-road think tanks tend to dominate the media discussion.  (Perhaps Brooks has heard of Brookings?) But he tries to explain their significance this way:

The first thing to say is that this recession has hit the new suburbs hardest, exactly where independents are likely to live. According to a survey by the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, 76 percent of suburbanites say they or someone they know have lost a job in the past year.

While that does sound suspiciously like a think tank catering to, well, those think tank-less independents, are those numbers very alarming? An Ipsos/Reuters survey from June found that 80 percent of Americans knew someone who lost a job. A July Marist poll on New York state residents found that "82 percent of city voters and 79 percent of those in the suburbs" knew someone who'd lost a job in the past six months. Maybe Brooks' suburbs aren't so special after all.

Predictably, "this is not the only peculiar item in his column. He also claims that only 11 percent of the stimulus will be spent in the first seven months of the program." Even though, as economist Baker explains, the "Congressional Budget Office puts the figure at 20 percent, which doesn't seem bad for a program that is just getting started and should be spent out over time in any case." And

then, in full Republican talking point mode, Brooks tells us:

The House [health care] bill adds $239 billion to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It would pummel small businesses with an 8 percent payroll penalty. It would jack America's top tax rate above those in Italy and France. Top earners in New York and California would be giving more than 55 percent of earnings to one government entity or another.

Let's see if we can rewrite this slightly:

The House bill adds an amount equivalent to 10 percent of the spending on the Iraq and Afghan wars to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Some small businesses will end up converting as much as 8 percent of their wage bill into healthcare insurance for their workers. The richest 1 percent will see an increase in their marginal tax rate, but it will still be lower than in most European countries. And the effective marginal tax rate for the wealthy will still be far lower than the marginal tax rate and reduction in benefits that most moderate income families face.

Baker's version of the same points renders somewhat silly the sentiment he attributes to Brooks' screed: "Are you scared?"

But Brooks says many doubt whether Obama "has the courage to follow through" on these principles, and point to "the way the president has already caved in on the D.C. vouchers case":

Democrats in Congress just killed an experiment that gives 1,700 poor Washington kids school vouchers. They even refused to grandfather in the kids already in the program, so those children will be ripped away from their mentors and friends. The idea was to cause maximum suffering, and 58 Senators voted for it.

Obama has, in fact, been shamefully quiet about this. But in the next weeks he’ll at least try to protect the kids now in the program.

The odd thing is that the D.C. voucher program is a very poor poster child for the importance of rigorous, data-driven education policy that rewards success and punishes failure. The students participating in the voucher program have been watched closely, and according to two Department of Education studies they aren't doing significantly better in reading or math than the peers they left behind in public school. The one bright spot that the studies found is that parents of kids in voucher schools report being more satisfied--in other words, "parents think their own schools are much better than they are."

"Rigorous" is not a word one would apply to Brooks' argument here.

To David Brooks, lobbyists are nothing more than "experts" who provide important and helpful insight to legislators as they earnestly try to craft laws in the public interest. Not only are lobbyists a positive influence, but they're actually indispensable. The fact that these so-called "experts" are paid by the wealthiest corporate factions to ensure that the laws Congress passes are designed to serve their narrow, insular interests--and that this is accomplished by pouring money into the coffers of the very people who write the laws so that they're writing the laws that serve these interests--never makes it into Brooks' understanding of this process. Thus, he is baffled that anyone would find lobbyist-domination of our political process to be at all objectionable.

In Brooks' position Greenwald sees "the full expression of one of the most predominant attributes of the contemporary Beltway journalist"--which spells bad news for any reader tempted to take such creatures seriously: "Because they are integral members of the Washington establishment, rather than watchdogs over it, they are incapable of finding fault with political power and they thus reflexively defend it and want it to remain unchanged."

Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "David Brooks vs. the Real World: Columnist Dreams Up His Own Reality" (9-10/08) by Steve Rendall

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks (11/7/08) writes about "the [Obama] administration of my dreams":

They will actually believe in that stuff Obama says about postpartisan politics. That means there won’t just be a few token liberal Republicans in marginal jobs. There will be people like Robert Gates at Defense and Ray LaHood, Stuart Butler, Diane Ravitch, Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Jim Talent at other important jobs.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin? The McCain adviser who recently described Obama's "basic goal" as "taking money away from people who work for it and giving it to people who Barack Obama believes deserve it"? "Europeans call it socialism, Americans call it welfare, and Barack Obama calls it change"--that Douglas Holtz-Eakin?

Or Jim Talent, who declared less than three months ago that choosing Joe Biden as a running mate "demonstrates that the Obama campaign realizes that Senator Obama doesn’t have the foreign policy credentials or experience to be president"?

These are standards for being "serious" about post- or bipartisanship that are fundamentally non-serious.