Winners and Losers

Good old David Brooks has another column in which he speaks from the point of view of the common voter, but this time, he's switching gears:

For young people who have grown up on Facebook, YouTube, open-source software and an array of decentralized networks, this is a compelling theory of how change happens....

But Obama sounded like a cross between a social activist and a flannel-shirted software C.E.O. — as a nonhierarchical, collaborative leader who can inspire autonomous individuals to cooperate for the sake of common concerns.

Brooks has risen to prominence by virtue of a single rhetorical point: in a world of elite opinion, he alone has access to the common man, and it is he who will interpret their homespun wisdom into words the degenerate chattering class can understand. For years, he's been able to use it to tweak liberals who put faith into things like fact and reality and research and science. These elitist views didn't appeal to Main Street Americans, who saw through the narrow lens of their own self-interest and into the larger wisdom of (insert catastrophically bad GOP policy here).

But now that the folk seem to be turning from the GOP, his schtick is in jeopardy. Either he continues to play the only tune he knows and follows the people wherever their wisdom leads--even to Barack Hussein Obama--or he serves the Republican Party. This is a tough one to swallow. For the moment, he can praise Obama because the subject of his derision is Hillary Clinton. But what happens if the Dem wins in November?

You can see the toll it's taken on him. In media appearances, he's constantly bitchy. He doesn't like to talk about anything--vascillating between tetchy defenses of Bush and gushing praise of Obama--because it all exposes the coming fault.

Political realignments precipitate a reckoning. There emerge winners and losers. For those who hold tenaciously to the ideas of the vanquished, there is little not to be bitchy about.