David Brooks is impressed with the intellectual force of the Obama administration. And he’s also worried by it.
Brooks, the New York Times columnist and Public TV commentator, spoke Tuesday night — filling Orchestra Hall — for the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business. And he evoked echoes of JFK and David Halberstam as he talked about the Age of Obama.
Obama’s approach to politics and governing is marked by perceptiveness, intellectual force, self-control, incredible niceness, self-confidence, and a culture of debate, Brooks said. (How many of those marked the previous administration, I ask?)
But Brooks said he worries about the Obama crowd relying too much on their big brains. One person in the administration told Brooks “We have the best and the brightest.” The feeling is that smart people can make the car industry work, for example. Brooks, the professional skeptic, said, “Hey, did anyone read the book, the part about Vietnam?” Halberstam’s great book, The Best & the Brightest, required reading for anyone who would understand government and history, lays out how the Ivy League brain trust John Kennedy assembled in the White House got the nationalist insurgency in Vietnam wrong, learned the wrong lessons from the previous war, and marched us neck deep into a quagmire that still haunts us today.
“Epistemological modesty” is Brooks’s prescription for the Obama brains. He quotes Edmund Burke saying the world is a complicated place, actions in one area can have unintended consequences in others, and there’s a lot we don’t know. Too much faith in brainpower can get us all in a heap of trouble. So, Brooks says, “go slow, proceed step by step, proceed cautiously with some sense of pace.” Obama may be trying to do too much too fast. Not a surprising caution from a conservative. And it may not be good advice — making big changes fast may be what we need right now, and the time might be right for it. But what a delight to hear smart analysis of a smart administration.
Despite the administration’s lack of epistemological modesty (makes me feel brainy just to write that, and yes I had to look up the spelling), Brooks said he’s encouraged long-term about the current version of the best and the brightest because “one thing about this administration, it is certainly a learning organization.” They fully debate issues, and they’re capable of learning from mistakes and changing. And, with Obama’s “ruthless pragmatism” and his background in community organizing, he knows, we hope, the limits of brainpower.
Brooks said “I think he’s just trying to do too much with money we don’t have,” and that some of Obama’s enormously ambitious agenda will just have to slip away. He sees three phases of the Obama presidency — the frenetic and ambitious first 100 days, a period of struggle where ambitious goals will be limited by practical reality, and finally a chastened, less popular presidency that moves more slowly to accomplish real change in fewer areas.
A few other cool things Brooks said:
The conservative movement has fallen on hard times, with less serious thought and writing about societal issues. “We have fewer oddballs in conservatism and more sleazeballs,” he said.
Obama is actually culturally conservative in some ways — “He has a core distaste and contempt toward irresponsibility.” Which we’ve seen expressed on family values and Wall Street speculators.
A culture of debate in the administration is not just a metaphor. On the issue of releasing the torture memos from the Bush Justice Department, two debate teams were formed, they piled into Rahm Emanuel’s office and went at it for almost two hours with Obama listening, at the end of which time Obama dictated the administration’s policy.
Brooks has a Minnesota connection — his wife is the daughter of Orville Freeman’s chief of staff when our former governor headed the Department of Agriculture under JFK.
My thanks to Michael Porter, who heads the Master’s of Business Communications program at St. Thomas, for including me in a reception with Brooks to help celebrate the 25th anniversary of the excellent and creative MBC program.
–Bruce Benidt
(Photo from Win McNamee/Getty Images for Meet The Press)
The Same Rowdy Crowd 