The Sap

David Brooks has been a loyal booster for the Obama administration since 2008, using his perch at the New York Times to regularly express his hopes and admiration for the president. Now he confesses that he's had an epiphany. He realizes that he's been setting himself up for chronic disappointment. He's been duped by the man he thought would be a new kind of politician. He is, in his words, a sap:

I’m a sap, a specific kind of sap. I’m an Obama Sap.

When the president said the unemployed couldn’t wait 14 more months for help and we had to do something right away, I believed him. When administration officials called around saying that the possibility of a double-dip recession was horrifyingly real and that it would be irresponsible not to come up with a package that could pass right away, I believed them.

I liked Obama’s payroll tax cut ideas and urged Republicans to play along. But of course I’m a sap. 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.

Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around.

Brooks' contrition continues on for several more paragraphs, but reading it is a bit like watching those poor people in medieval Europe walking through a village flagellating themselves in hopes that their penance will somehow atone for their sins and earn them God's favor.

Brooks' disillusionment with Mr. Obama is touching in its pathos, but it raises a question: What reason did he have for thinking that Mr. Obama would turn out otherwise than he has? Where was the evidence in his past experience to think that he was anything but a far-left community organizer?

He sounds a bit like the naive teenage girl who gives her heart to the handsome lothario who promises her his undying love and a lifetime of happiness until he beds her and then moves on leaving her brokenhearted and mystified as to how she could have ever thought he was such a wonderful guy in the first place. It's sad.