David Brooks of the New York Times is just back from the Damascus road where the scales have apparently fallen from his eyes:
Those of us who consider ourselves moderates - moderate-conservative, in my case - are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget "contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal's dream of a new New Deal."
Brooks goes on to explain his disillusionment with the man he supported for the presidency last year. It's a remarkable essay as much for its tacit admission of inexcusable ignorance as for its criticism of Obama's radicalism. How could anyone who follows politics as closely as Brooks does not know what kind of an agenda Barack Obama would seek to implement once elected? It's as if all the evidence was there to be seen, but, like an infatuated teenage girl swooning over the class playboy, Brooks was so smitten by Obama's charms that he simply failed to see what was obvious to just about everybody else on both the left and the right.
And he's not the only one. Christopher Buckley is having second thoughts as well. Now that the intellectual psychotropics are wearing off, these erstwhile conservatives are emerging from their stupor, blinking their eyes, and wondering what happened to them.
Well, one thing that happened to them is that they pretty much lost whatever credibility they once had.
RLC