NYT's David Brooks: "I miss Barack Obama."

 Photo credit:  Doug Mills/New York Times

David Brooks, center-right columnist for the New York Times, is already missing President Barack Obama, he writes in his Feb. 9, 2016 column.

"As this primary season has gone along, a strange sensation has come over me: I miss Barack Obama. Now, obviously I disagree with a lot of Obama’s policy decisions. . . . But over the course of this campaign it feels as if there’s been a decline in behavioral standards across the board. Many of the traits of character and leadership that Obama possesses, and that maybe we have taken too much for granted, have suddenly gone missing or are in short supply."

Brooks lists these as:

1.  Basic integrity

2.  A sense of basic humanity and respect for the dignity of others

3.  A soundness in his decision-making process

4.  Grace under pressure

5.  A resilient sense of optimism 

In his column, he elaborates on each of these qualities and concludes, regarding #5, that to listen to some of the current presidential candidates ". . . is to wallow in the pornography of pessimism, to conclude that this country is on the verge of complete collapse. That’s simply not true. We have problems, but they are less serious than those faced by just about any other nation on earth. . . .

"No, Obama has not been temperamentally perfect. Too often he’s been disdainful, aloof, resentful and insular. But there is a tone of ugliness creeping across the world, as democracies retreat, as tribalism mounts, as suspiciousness and authoritarianism take center stage.

"Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance that I’m beginning to miss, and that I suspect we will all miss a bit, regardless of who replaces him."

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David Brooks retains his belief in Burkean conservatism, but he finds little in today's Republican Party to feel compatible with.   His phrase "pornography of pessimism" captures what we hear from everyone except John Kasich on the GOP debate stage.

That Brooks took this moment to praise Obama's temperament underlines the concern about Marco Rubio's bad moment in the last debate.   Now even some of his unidentified "allies" are saying that, ever since high schools days, Rubio tends to panic under pressure, and his friends have to try to calm him down.   This is the more serious underlying problem than just the outward symptom of robotic parroting of talking points.   Perhaps he developed that memorizing trick as his way to overcome his anxiety under stress.

Ralph