Brooks: McCain is an Unprincipled Sellout

I’m not sure I’ve ever really understood the progressive blogosphere convention that everything David Brooks writes must be read in the most ungenerous way possible. Certainly, though, if you apply that method to Brooks’ column from yesterday the widespread derision with which it was greeted on liberal blogs is warranted. But I thought it was a pretty good column. Recall that Brooks has historically been a big McCain fan. Back during the 2000 campaign, he was one of the relatively small number of decidedly conservative journalists to fall for McMania. And while lots of writers have gushed with praise for McCain over the years, Brooks was something more like an important ideologist of McCainism, someone who both praised McCain and also helped shape the higher rationale for his political ambitions. McCain, Brooks thought, was an ideal political vessel for ideas that Brooks thought were important. Brooks thought, in other words, that McCain was substantially different from and better than your average politician.

Brooks’ column from yesterday, meanwhile, is about how Brooks no longer thinks that’s true. It argues that McCain, like everyone else, turns out to be happy to put his personal ambition ahead of his ideals and principles. And it argues that McCain doesn’t have any special qualities whereby his ambition is best served through honorable methods. He’s a typical pol pulling the typical stuff. Now if you’re a conservative, as Brooks is, you’re still going to look at the situation and decide that in a Presidential election you should vote for the conservative candidate — typical pol though he may be. But the main theme of McCain campaign is that he isn’t like that that he “puts country first” as witnessed by his wartime service — we’re supposed to believe that he’s a much, much, much better and more elevated kind of political leader than your average politician. And Brooks is saying that’s not true. He’s not saying it the way I would say it, but I think it’s all the more valuable for coming from a conservative McCain fan and for being written with the “more in sadness than in anger” tone you would expect from a conservative McCain fan.