Is there hope for David Brooks? Brooks begins his column with his usual attack on his view of the Democrats as “liberal elites who reviled the military.” While we’ve heard the same nonsense from him many times in the past, this time he acknowledges that there are Democrats running who do not fit his stereotype:
Yet here is Jim Webb running for the Senate as a Democrat. The events of the past few years — especially the Iraq war — shook people like Webb loose from the Republican Party and weakened their aversion to the Democratic Party. In state after state, white married parents making between $35,000 and $50,000 a year are shifting in the Democratic direction.
So the Democratic Congressional delegation that convenes next year will be different from the ones we’ve seen. It will feature ideologically and culturally diverse people who cannot be silenced or reduced to lockstep party loyalists, whether Webb wins or not. (I suspect he will.)
Among other things, this election has shown how important it is to be independent. You do not want your opponent running ads calling you a rubber stamp, because in this climate that hurts. That’s especially true for Republicans — all around the country, there are G.O.P. loyalists pretending to be moderate mavericks, like Jeff Flake and Mark Kirk. But it’s also true for Democrats.
And we may be about to learn if the party of Nancy Pelosi can make room for the Jim Webbs of the world. We’ve already learned that the party of George Bush and Tom DeLay did a terrible job making room for its own mavericks and moderates.
Reality, with its well known liberal bias (noted below the fold on the last post) is catching up with Brooks’ stereotypes. It is the Republicans who have chased out everyone other than extremists, while the Democrats are a big tent party which does not match the description we normally read from David Brooks.
