Times are tough for the president, too—which isn’t a coincidence. It sometimes seems as if Barack Obama and David Brooks share the same rational, unflappable DNA. Every Monday and Thursday, as his deadline approaches, Brooks gets a call from someone in the White House—“I’m not going to say who,” he says, which means Rahm—asking if tomorrow is going to be a good day.
In a world where there were archetypal Republicans who could be influenced by the archetypal David Brooks (as opposed to the real one, who really is a conservative hack with a fake reasonable face), this might make sense. But we do not live in a world with Republican senators who give a shit what David Brooks thinks.