I agree, Brooks does have a point about Obama and I don't think it's anything like the problem we got with Bush. Bush is simply a spoiled brat rich kid who never grew up. He has the emotional maturity of a 2 year old. But Obama isn't fully connecting with most people and they aren't that sure what they're getting. They may decide to vote for him but they're not going to ever say they'd like to have a beer with him.

As for the prodigal son, fortunately McCain is looking more like the prodigal great grand-father.

With all the discussion lately about personal ambition in presidential candidates, I thought again about how Bush never really seemed to have the drive to be president, took a more "what the heck, if they want it, I'll try it" attitude. It seemed like 9/11 gave him a "chosen by God" drive to stay. If 9/11 hadn't happened, and he hadn't fallen for the pre-emptive and neo-con thing, and the related issues about Dad not finishing the job with Saddam, I wonder if he would have really even wanted a second term. Apart from Iraq and education, he seems to have little passion for the job.

I realize this post is mainly a parody of Brooks, but to the extent that the idea is being taken seriously that Bush failed politically because of some sort of defect in his personal narrative, or a dissonance in the vibe he projects to ordinary Americans, I'm not buying it.

Bush failed because, at bottom, at the level where the hard, actual reality of inherent competence or incompetence trumps back story, punditry, narrative and spin, Bush is an idiot. There was nothing wrong with his personal narrative or vibe. That is, there was nothing wrong with his narrative and vibe that couldn't have been patched up and reworked into a success story, if Bush had proved up to the job. But he wasn't up to the job. And that's not because of his affective distance or rootlessness. It's because he's an uneducated moron. And he is a moron in a job that is unforgiving of morons. He reached a level where he couldn't fake it anymore, or get bailed out by paternal string pulling at higher levels. He was at the highest level already, and when the buck stopped at his desk it turned out he never learned how to count and couldn't make change.

We know how the Bush life narrative was supposed to go to get to the happy and inspiring ending. Yes, he’s the classic spoiled, preppy brat. Yes, he’s the drunken, rugby club frat boy who probably spent his college days puking a lot and date-raping the drunk chicks at the rugby kegger. Yes, he’s the draft-dodging wannabe with the intimidating father, who is handed the keys to the kingdom through no merit of his own.

It's a classic American yarn. And we know how its supposed to turn out happily in the land of fiction. He meets the one pretty but independent-spirited cheerleader of impervious virtue and determined moral strength, the one who takes no crap, yet sees the good in him, and challenges him to discover and live out his true potential and destiny for greatness. It's supposed to turn out that he has all sorts of hidden talents and untapped potential that finally surge to the top when he is challenged by those critical, climactic, life-shaping events.

But there is a real world, and it isn't fiction. So in order for the happy ending to occur, it has to be the case that this non-fictional man actually does possess those hidden talents and unfulfilled potentialites. But that just wasn't the case with Bush. The Republicans thought America was living on easy street at the prosperous and unexciting end of history. So they thought all you needed was a guy who looked the part. But the world turned out to be more interesting than that; and it also turns out that it is just not true any fool can be president.

Abe Lincoln could have been the same homely and sinewy rail splitter; the same log cabin, backwoods purveyor of wry and impish homespun; the same backslapping honest Abe. But if it turned out that he couldn't find Antietam or Vicksburg on a map, or that didn't really understand the difference between an Abolitionist and a Secessionist, he would have been an utter political failure, narrative or no narrative, vibe or no vibe.

If Dwight Eisenhower had sunk the invasion fleet or commanded it into an invasion-ending ambush, he would have been a catastrophic political failure too. It doesn't matter how Americans perceived him before that, or what they might have "sensed" about him. Fortunately, he seems to have actually known something about what he was doing, about generalship.

Bush failed because he didn't really know what he was doing; and like most people who don't know what they are doing, he fucked up. In the real world, there is no special providence watching over fools and children. When fools drive their car off the cliff, they are not gently blown over to the other side by guardian angels. They crash at the bottom of the cliff.

Bush is Barbara's son. George W. like JFK believed wealth required service. Barbara believes wealth bestows entitlement.

Have to say that I've changed my mind about Brooks. His NYT piece is really brilliant.

For some reason Sleeper's take on Brooks, I think, misses a fundamental difference between Bush and Obama.

Brooks' central point has to do with Obama's not being fully "of" any community per se. There is pathos in Obama as he tries to connect with the rest of us. It is not exactly coolness so much as a weariness of misplaced familiarity.

Bush--as Sleeper points out--is also not "of" any place either. But there is a deep difference here.

Bush finds himself in a milieu that demands and expects things of him that he cannot deliver on.

He is trapped.

He feels he has to play the cards that he has been dealt and he does the best he can. This much we have to grant the man.

Obama's aloofness stems from transcendence. He did not grow up a child of privilege deep in the heart of the American aristocracy. He grew up an observer.

Obama's gift is his uncanny ability to see things from a slight distance. I see in him a person keenly aware of himself and his surroundings. Unusual for a politician I would say.

Recall Socrates "the unexamined life is not worth living"

Nobody can doubt Obama's exceptional skill of examination, self or otherwise.

In a sense both men live removed from the community such as it is. Bush because he simply cannot live up to what is expected of him and Obama because he transcends it.

Bush's alienation is forced and the source of much of his anger. Obama's “alienation” is not tumultuous and comes with the territory of a thoughtful life. It remains to be seen whether Obama can handle the great power that he seeks with virtue and equanimity.

Wow, I botched my link. it was supposed to read:

So. Brooks' cockamamie explanation is that Obama's a Sojourner?

Remember the elitist, Beltway douche consensus about Bill Clinton? There goes the neighborhood! Who let the Beverly Hillbillies in? Substitute "Black man" for "Bubba" and a whole decade of Brooks and Dowd columns just rewrote themselves.

Brooks works manfully to cram Obama into his pop sociological theory about post-boomer meritocrats, and sojourning rolling stones with radically reconstructed identities. But the shoes don’t fit.

Obama has lived in Chicago for over twenty years, and almost his entire adult life. He is a fixture of the Chicago scene and a local hero in Hyde Park, where he has built his entire career, and established and raised his family, and where he is very well-known and frequently seen around the neighborhood.

Like most of us, Obama has had more than one job in his life, occasionally seeking new challenges, new opportunities and greater responsibility. But he has pretty much done this in one place and one community. Obama didn’t quit being a community organizer just before the organizing started to be successful, but was in fact very successful as a community organizer; and was then very successful as a State senator, a job that is natural extension of the first job. He was a very successful college professor too. Brooks’s attempt to paint Obama as some sort of uneasy and rootless drifter, standing apart from everything and tirelessly moving onward and upward from restless ambition and a fluid identity, is a slur and is false to Obama’s life.

For several months the problem with Obama, according to conservatives, was supposed to be that he is too much a Chicago pol, too rooted in the Chicago way, too much a part of his Chicago neighborhood and the dirty Chicago political system. That approach didn’t work too well for him, so now they are trying the angle that the problem with Obama is that he is not a Chicago pol, and he is too “apart” from the place he has pursued his entire career. Slick tacking, Republicans!

While Obama was teaching at the University of Chicago, he also worked for a law firm. He was also a legislator at the same. It is not at all uncommon for people who are lecturers at a university, but who have other careers going at the same time, to leave the long-term institutional questions to the career academics who are invested entirely in the academic life – to the tenured and tenure-tracked. If you think this is at all an unusual situation, or bespeaks a notable “apartness”, you have never been at a university and don’t understand the different elements of a university faculty. As for the notion that Obama was “in the legislature” but not “of the legislature”, you could probably say the same thing about anyone who has become a governor, a senator or a president. Not all state legislators are state senate lifers. How many people are? Don’t most of them eventually do something else?

Obama has an extremely coherent political philosophy, a philosophy that has remained quite consistent since he began articulating it years ago in books and speeches. He occasionally changes a position on some policy detail, but the philosophy doesn’t appear to change. If it differs in some ways from boomer-era liberalism, that is because Obama’s political outlook has a strong religious and communitarian dimension that places demands on individuals beyond those proposed by the liberationist, rights-based individualism of late 20th-century liberalism. Brooks again tries to pervert this into the myth of the Obama of the vacillating and uncommitted identity, the guy who is "liberal, but not fully liberal". To me, the political philosophy a man with a strong sense of community and of transcendent, non-narcissistic purpose, which puts him at odds with some of the more superficial streams of fin-de-siecle, postmodern, lib-lefty thought. And of course if Obama were a conventional late 20th century liberal, that itself would be pointed to by Brooks as a sign of Obama’s weak and flip-floppy identity. Because that’s the line conservatives always take.

In my book, Brooks is just a conservative hack with a fancy New York veneer of pseudo-intellectuality, and his opinion piece is nothing but a rehash of tired conservative themes, dressed up in the language of Brooks’s cutesy social theories. I would remind people that conservatives have for years argued that liberalism is a rootless philosophy. They pull this charge out every four years. They tell their base the same story over and over: Real Americans don’t change. Real Americans aren’t pioneers, who leave their homes and head to the frontier seeking challenge and adventure. They aren’t emigrants and immigrants who leave their huddled masses in the Old Country for opportunity, and for a new and better life. Real Americans don’t leave town and go to college; they don’t get no fancy educations, or change and improve their ideas and thinking abilities in any way. Real Americans like to stay huddled around the campfire. They are god-fearingly afraid of terrorists; afraid of Spanish-speakers, afraid of challenge; afraid of Darwin; afraid of fast, smart women in high heels; afraid of big cities; afraid of pretty much everything – just like you Mr. and Mrs. America! Brooks is just ladling out the same demagogic right-wing slop with a splash of Manhattan seasoning.

This ability to stand apart accounts for his fantastic powers of observation, and his skills as a writer and thinker

Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” is a journey forward, about a man who took the disparate parts of his past and constructed an identity of his own.

If you grew up in the 1950s, you were inclined to regard your identity as something you were born with. If you grew up in the 1970s, you were more likely to regard your identity as something you created.

If Obama is fully a member of any club — and perhaps he isn’t — it is the club of smart post-boomer meritocrats.____Brooks

Well Jim, I was merely looking at Brooks piece in isolation. I don't read him on a regular basis.

I did re-read it and I have to say based on what has been said here so far, I had a less favorable take than my first read. But I still like the general insight it conveys.

I disagree with your implication that Brooks is not entitled somehow to make points that might not be as favorable to Obama as one would wish.

That might have legs for an Obama ad campaign but this site is rather insular and there is no need for that.

One sure way to loise an election is to think that your candidate should not be looked at with a critical eye.

Brooks is entitled to cast his critical eye on Obama. We know he is a McCain operative. The point is I did not think it was just another cheap shot at Obama. The argument left me with a better understanding of Obama than before I read it. That's good enough for me to rate it as legitimate.

As to your question of why he had to make exactly THOSE particular points, I'm a little baffled by that question. Why not? They are for the most part illuminating.

It can be argued that--accepting your meta analysis of Brooks as someone who feigns to the left on occasion to dupe some fraction of NYT readers--I should be more circumspect in my praise for this particular writer. But I think that’s somewhat mistaken.

The enigmatic aspect of Obama's character is evident. It helps if Brooks (or anyone really) digs into that aspect and gives us some theory of what’s behind it. I think Brooks theory has some merit.

It can only help Obama’s campaign.

So I am grateful to Brooks for bringing this issue to our attention.

It lead to what I consider a fruitful discussion here.

Keep your friends close but your enemies even closer (or something like that)

Brooks' column inspired several thought-provoking Letters to the Editor, they are here. I especially liked this one:

To the Editor:

David Brooks’s analysis of Barack Obama is familiar to anyone who grew up traveling overseas. Children of Foreign Service officers, the military, corporate workers transferred between different international locations — all learn these powers of observation, all learn exactly who they are but never exactly where they are.

As the child of a Foreign Service officer, I recognize Mr. Obama and myself in this analysis all too clearly. We have a profound love of America, for we have seen so many alternatives. We love home with the intensity of someone who has not been there as much as he wanted. We see its virtues and its faults all too clearly, and we love the place. We also know all the virtues and all the faults of so many other places, having been there, too.

Steve Holton
Ossining, N.Y., Aug. 5, 2008

I still think you are wrong about the column, it was a good one, such varied and thoughtful reactions are proof.