David Brooks has a column on the independents in the wake of Tuesday's election, deploying his usual technique of communing with them via stereotypes -- "They’re looking for a safe pair of hands." The piece is economically unserious and also follows the time-tested pundit model of demanding politicians follow public opinion when it suits Brooks' views but lauding as courageous those politicians who ignore it when it doesn't. Noam Scheiber does a good job taking Brooks to the woodshed, but I want to focus on one particular argument:Right now, independent voters are astonishingly volatile. Democrats did poorly in elections on Tuesday partly because of disappointed liberals who think that President Obama is moving too slowly, but mostly because of anxious suburban independents who think he is moving too fast.Brooks makes no attempt to justify the idea that Obama is moving too fast, in part because it's hard to find evidence that supports such a statement. Since the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act last winter, the president hasn't convinced Congress to pass a major piece of legislation. That's not to say he hasn't done anything -- he has shepherded health-care reform through a long and thorough public debate, he has made numerous important executive-branch appointments and decisions, he has developed a budget that will cut the deficit in half in four years.Of the major parts of his legislative agenda, though, he has yet to achieve ... any of them. True, congressional Republicans have been in the habit of saying things are moving too fast, but in comparison to what, they don't say. Nor do they offer any real alternatives for solving problems. If they don't like what the Democrats are offering, they can vote against their agenda, but requesting time to talk and then having nothing to say doesn't cut it. Meanwhile, I'm not the first to note, Republicans are demanding that Obama make immediate decisions on foreign-policy matters. It's hard to take them seriously.In any case, I'd be very curious to hear what Brooks thinks Obama is doing so quickly that it alarms independents, and why he thinks that his fast action on these policies with which I'm unfamiliar is of greater concern to independents than, oh, the economy.
-- Tim Fernholz
