I wrote here yesterday that McCain and the Republicans are forcing smart conservative and neo-conservative Republicans like New York Times columnist David Brooks to choose between their intellectual/moral self-respect and their ideological and partisan loyalties.

William F. Buckley's son Christopher has endorsed Obama. So has Ed Koch. George Will, the National Review's Jonah Goldberg and even, heaven help us, neo-con scourge Charles Krauthammer have virtually endorsed him and have certainly written off McCain/Palin.

So, what did Brooks do this morning; what does it show us; and why does it matter?

Brooks, I wrote, could have stayed in the McCain/Palin chorus line with his friend and former mentor, the neoconservative Field Marshall and fellow Times columnist William von Kristol. Or he could have jumped to Obama, as those I've mentioned have done.

But there was a third, cheaper option, I noted -- the one least likely to cost Brooks his job as the conservative Republican whom liberals like most: He could slip into the role of the columnist savant who sits up in the hills above the battle, watches the fighting below, and, when it's over, comes down and shoots the wounded.

Why does this matter? Well, Brooks' Times column appears twice a week and is syndicated in scores of other newspapers. He appears every week on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer (he was also ubiquitous in PBS convention and debate commentaries), and on NPR's "All Things Considered."

Obviously, a lot of editors and producers consider him a smart, genial conservative appropriate for relatively well-educated, liberal audiences. So it's important not only to counter Brooks' arguments but to expose their roots and scrutinize his character as a supposed tribune of intelligent conservative Republican thinking.

Brooks has decided that he'd rather keep his job than his standing among today's embattled Republican and conservative activists. So this morning -- and with Brooks, remember, it's only for this morning - he virtually conceded the election to Obama but didn't endorse him, opting to carry his conservative convictions, such as they are, into a carping exile, from which he immediately began picking at the likely Democratic triumph.

There'll be plenty to pick at, assuming the Democratic coalition wins. If you think Nancy Pelosi's and Harry Reid's Congress has been disappointing not only on leftist or rightist grounds but in essential civic-republican terms, you're gonna love the even stronger Democratic Congress, and David Brooks will have a lot of fun shooting fish in that barrel.

But Brooks is getting rather defensively ahead of himself by writing this morning that triumphant tax-and-spend liberals will drown out the Democrats' "remaining moderates" if the latter try to warn that stimulus programs "need to be targeted and should sunset as the crisis passes."

What does he mean, "remaining" moderates? Democrats won in 2006 by running lots of fiscal moderates and social conservatives. Even now, in this enormous capitalist crisis, Democrats aren't trying to win by sounding like Ralph Nader.

And Brooks' anticipatory carping isn't the same as having any constructive alternatives of his own. It's his way of distracting us from the fact that he no longer does have any.
He has the brains of the conservative political theorists Michael Oakeshott or John Gray but the instincts of neo-con wheedlers and war-mongers Paul Wolfowitz or Robert Kagan. What he lacks are the brains or governing temperament of a Franklin D. Roosevelt or, let us hope, a Barack Obama and a Joe Biden.

So Brooks is gearing up to lampoon the inevitable follies in the Democratic recovery plan, playing the traditional role of conservatives in the wilderness who cry "Stop!" without showing any credible way forward. Sometimes he'll play the friendly conservative uncle and scold, and, when he does it well, he'll be useful.

But he'll often do it cheaply or downright badly, for reasons that transcend the sorry Brooks himself. Like most American conservatives, he can't reconcile his yearning for an ordered, almost sacred liberty and national greatness with his knee-jerk obeisance to every whim of global capital and consumption, which subvert and destroy what he means to defend.

Neoliberal, corporatist Dems face this predicament, too, Barack Obama among them. But because the Democrats are more honest about "free-market" dangers than demagogic, pseudo-populist Republicans, and because they'll try to ameliorate them at the edges, they'll make easy targets when they fail. And David Brooks' neo-con gut will be itching and twitching to get them, even between now and November 4.

It's cheap work, but this week he showed that he's cut out for it by choosing not to choose.