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Another entry in the annals of Barack Obama-as-reflection-of-observer's-values, today's David Brooks column makes the case that Obama's economic speech last week was one of conservative deference to small town values:
If Republicans aren’t nervous, they should be. Obama is arguing for his activist agenda not on the basis of class-consciousness, which is alien to America, but as a defense of middle-class morality, which is central to it. Obama is positioning the Democrats as the party of order, responsibility and small-town values. If he pulls this mantle away from the Republicans, it would be the greatest train robbery in American politics.I'd note that Republicans have more or less abandoned that mantle of their own volition in the last eight years, so if Obama can snatch it up it's more like a free give-away than a train robbery. But the column reflects Brooks' general over-reliance on cultural stereotypes; to wit, if Republicans are "small-town," Democrats are "big-city," and when things change, it's news! When Brooks writes of the administration that "they aim to restructure incentives in order to channel the animal drives of the marketplace in responsible directions," it's clear he's read Frank Foer and Noam Scheiber's recent piece at the New Republic, which does a better job of articulating Obama's vision of government than Brooks himself. Essentially, the new president's approach has much less to do with either class consciousness or social order than it does a series of typically liberal assumptions about public and private interests mated with new thinking about behavioral economics. It is well worth a read, and I'll have more bloggy things to say about it later.
-- Tim Fernholz
