David Brooks: A Self-Admitted "Sap" Confesses his Past Sins of Omission

David Brooks seems to have rewired his attic and his lights are now turning on in the top floor of his brain cavity:

...When the president unveiled the second half of his stimulus it became clear that this package has nothing to do with helping people right away or averting a double dip. This is a campaign marker, not a jobs bill.

It recycles ideas that couldn’t get passed even when Democrats controlled Congress. In his remarks Monday the president didn’t try to win Republicans to even some parts of his measures. He repeated the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives.

He claimed we can afford future Medicare costs if we raise taxes on the rich. He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries. (In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S. People in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income to the federal government while the average worker pays less than 14 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)

This wasn’t a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I’m a sap for thinking it was possible.

David and his high-minded admiration for the crease on Obama's well-tailored bespoke suit had been mesmerized for years by the flatulent flimflammery this community organizer with a flair for self-promotion had beguiled the gullible "brain-dead liberals," as David Mamet would characterize them, with all sorts of intriguing back alleys of political ingenuity---calling something "shovel-ready" when there was a union-restricted proviso attached to the infrastructure improvement being proposed. David was a center-left dupe or fellow-traveler of this protean chimera of a politician, whose only identity seems to be that of a shape-shifter or a chameleon-on-plaid, Brooks was gulled because he is a natural egghead, and his ideals take many blows before he allows them to shatter, or in this case disappear into a cultural-revolution type confession of "crimes against the people." But, like a much finer mind such as that of Augustine or Whittaker Chambers, perhaps this self-confessed "sap" may have finally seen the light. Here's more of his lugubrious musings:

....The president is sounding like the Al Gore for President campaign, but without the earth tones. Tax increases for the rich! Protect entitlements! People versus the powerful! I was hoping the president would give a cynical nation something unconventional, but, as you know, I’m a sap.

Being a sap, I still believe that the president’s soul would like to do something about the country’s structural problems. I keep thinking he’s a few weeks away from proposing serious tax reform and entitlement reform. But each time he gets close, he rips the football away. He whispered about seriously reforming Medicare but then opted for changes that are worthy but small. He talks about fundamental tax reform, but I keep forgetting that he has promised never to raise taxes on people in the bottom 98 percent of the income scale.

That means when he talks about raising revenue, which he is right to do, he can’t really talk about anything substantive. He can’t tax gasoline. He can’t tax consumption. He can’t do a comprehensive tax reform. He has to restrict his tax policy changes to the top 2 percent, and to get any real revenue he’s got to hit them in every which way. We’re not going to simplify the tax code, but by God Obama’s going to raise taxes on rich people who give to charity! We’ve got to do something to reduce the awful philanthropy surplus plaguing this country!

The president believes the press corps imposes a false equivalency on American politics. We assign equal blame to both parties for the dysfunctional politics when in reality the Republicans are more rigid and extreme. There’s a lot of truth to that, but at least Republicans respect Americans enough to tell us what they really think. The White House gives moderates little morsels of hope, and then rips them from our mouths. To be an Obama admirer is to toggle from being uplifted to feeling used.

The White House has decided to wage the campaign as fighting liberals. I guess I understand the choice, but I still believe in the governing style Obama talked about in 2008. I may be the last one. I’m a sap.

Writing a letter to the NYT is like shedding a tear in the ocean when it comes to politics, but here's my latest comment I submitted on David Brooks column:

It's apparent that Obama's absurd new package of roughly $1.5 trillion in "revenue enhancements," removal of tax deductions on charitable contributions and dozens of other tax and spend schemes are, as Brooks finally concedes, simply political markers without a chance of passing in Congress. Rather than having a "Sister Soljah moment" as Clinton did when he pivoted to the center, Obama appears to have doubled down on some sort of "Give 'Em Hell, Harry" strategy and will soon be whining about the "Do-Nothing 111th Congress" or some such silly frontal attack on the GOP. It worked when everyone thought Truman's chances were slim or nil, and Obama's economic haplessness assures another year of no growth.

The top US earners are already double-taxed on capital gains and Obama is removing any motivation to invest in a country which punishes entrepreneurial risk-taking and rewards falling into the 51% of the population, mostly Democrats, who pay no taxes at all. Why invest when regulatory watchdogs and excessive imposts remove any real chance or incentive to succeed. First, Sarbanes-Oxley and now Dodd-Frank are paralyzing the American business environment---and if in the remote chance, one succeeds in innovating or marketing a viable product, without the political backing such as Solyndra had, one's chances of success recede to a vanishing point.

Obama is anti-business and for a mixed-economic regime resembling the corporatist crony capitalism of the Thirties. Despite the efforts of the elite media and academic theoreticians, he is simply going to lose this battle against a windmill of his own imagining.

And Obama'a high-minded rhetorical pomposity is now descending to the silliness of "gun-to-a-knife-fight" bravado and resembles marxist tropes of setting up class warfare as a model for democratic politics. He should be ashamed of himself. A one-termer for sure.