In a hybrid of defense closing argument and political obituary, David Brooks in today’s New York Times comes forward as a character witness for “a serious man prone to serious things.”
Citing his candor, humility, “crusade” against corruption and, most of all, his “impressive” years as the Iraq war deteriorated, Brooks attempts to separate that John McCain from today’s campaigner “without a groundbreaking argument about why he is different” who has had to “rely on tactical gimmicks to stay afloat.”
Brooks says that failure comes “in part because of his Senate training and the tendency to take issues on one at a time—-in part, because of the foolish decision to run a traditional right-left campaign against Obama and, in part, because McCain has never really resolved the contradiction between the Barry Goldwater and Teddy Roosevelt sides of his worldview.
“One day he’s a small-government Western conservative; the next he’s a Bull Moose progressive. The two don’t add up–as we’ve seen in his uneven reaction to the financial crisis.”