Generally speaking, there's no body more risible on the New York Times than David "Bobo" Brooks. A neocon and a movement conservative, he's hitched himself to every bad cause the Bush Administration ever went for, and continued to go for these causes long after his heart was clearly no longer in it. He also goes in for a sort of pop-sociology that's easy to make fun of, and Lord Knows, we've had our fun with it.
But to my great surprise, he gets the Obama Administration right today in a column called Vince Lombardi Politics. The money quote is:
But the new approach comes with its own shortcomings. To understand them, we have to distinguish between two types of pragmatism. There is legislative pragmatism — writing bills that can pass. Then there is policy pragmatism — creating programs that work. These two pragmatisms are in tension, and in their current frame of mind, Democrats often put the former before the latter.
Damned if Bobo isn't right about this. More on the flip.
I hate to admit that Bobo is right about anything. But after watching the way the Administration handled the stimulus bill, and the watered down climate bill that just cleared the house, it's hard for me as a progressive to differ with Brooks when he writes
On cap and trade, the House chairmen took a relatively clean though politically difficult idea — auctioning off pollution permits — and they transformed it into a morass of corporate giveaways that make the stimulus bill look parsimonious. Permits would now be given to well-connected companies. Utilities and agribusiness would be rolling in government-generated profits. Thousands of goodies were thrown into the 1,201-page bill to win votes.
The bill passed the House, but would it actually reduce emissions? It’s impossible to know.
Most of us likely would not agree with Brooks as to what a good bill would have looked like, but it's hard to disagree with his point here. They passed something, certainly. But will it do any good except for the various people that were bought off? Who the hell knows. Brooks doesn't. And neither do I.
What he says about health care I'll leave you to read on your own. As someone who has spent a good deal of his waking time over the last couple of weeks trying to goad my excuse for a senator (Feinstein) to do right by health care reform, I have to say I share some of Brook's pessimism about how Obama is going about the public's business.
Passing bills is great. But passing bills that won't help the public is a recipe for increasing public cynicism. And will be political malpractice to boot.