After we were denied entry into the New York Times tent -- the reporters are on deadline or something -- we happily spotted David Brooks and asked him about his first day at the convention.

Did the schedule changes throw off all your plans?
Nah, my deadline was before the real convention anyway, so I just wrote a column in my hotel room about Sarah Palin.

Is that up now?
No, this is old media, it takes hours. It’s for tomorrow.

What are you saying about Sarah Palin?
I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s the pros and cons.

How did you react to today's news?
I confess I was happy.  read more »

DENVER—"There's my girl!" Chevy Chase bellowed as Madeline Albright walked into the backroom of the Vanity Fair-Google party on Thursday, August 28. The towering comedian, who was clad in a blazer, T-shirt and jeans, bent down to embrace his old friend. They discussed plans to get together—Mr. Chase promising an e-mail from "his people"—mugged for the cameras, and agreed that Barack Obama had nailed his speech. "If we're seen together, you're in trouble," joked the funnyman.

After a hearty laugh, conversation returned to the speech. Ms. Albright said that while the presidential candidate is incredibly charming in person, she was also pleased with the "diplomacy" of the speech.  read more »

Once again, the right is up in arms, yelling that the Liberal Media is conspiring to distort coverage and silence opposing views so that their chosen candidate might claim the White House. Several specific developments account for the current clamoring.

One is the presidential-level press coverage of Barack Obama’s trip to Afghanistan and the Middle East, where he’s been accompanied by all three network news anchors and many of the most prominent television and print correspondents. John McCain, meanwhile, has taken many similar excursions but never received remotely comparable coverage. And this week in particular, McCain seems sort of like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone – left by himself while everyone else heads overseas.  read more »

"The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds." —David Brooks, The Alpha Geeks, The New York Times, May 23, 2008.  read more »

After last night's debate, New York Times columnist David Brooks was chatting with a group of people. One of them said: "I hear you hired that conservative Bill Kristol." David Brooks responded: "More like a pseudoconservative."

The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus gets all bloggy in her column today, quoting the Times' Paul Krugman disparaging those who argue that Social Security faces a serious financing problem, then lining up passages written by Mr. Krugman earlier this decade in which he seems to agree that it does.

The attack comes on the heels of Mr. Krugman's spat with fellow Times columnist David Brooks over Reagan and race, in which, in apparent observance of an unspoken Times rule, each delicately avoided naming the other. So it'll be interesting to see whether Mr. Krugman responds to Ms. Marcus, and, if so, whether the rule seems to work any differently when the other columnist writes for a different paper.

The battle over Reagan and race that had been playing out recently on the New York Times op-ed page appeared to have subsided by the end of last week.  But it received new life over the weekend when Reagan biographer Lou Cannon contributed a guest op-ed asserting that "Ronald Reagan was not a racist." 

Today, Paul Krugman responds, arguing, as he has before, that Reagan used racist appeals for political benefit.  Referring to Mr. Cannon and Times columnist David Brooks, he notes: "Reagan's defenders protest furiously that he wasn't personally bigoted. So what? We're talking about his political strategy. His personal beliefs are irrelevant."

 read more »

The recent Brooks vs. Krugman (with an assist from Herbert) smackdown on the New York Times op-ed page has left a lot of people wondering: Why aren't Times columnists allowed to attack each other by name?  After all, doing so would make these arguments a lot easier for readers to follow.

Well it turns out that, as near as anyone can tell, they are allowed. So why don't they?  We've put in queries to Messrs. Brooks and Krugman, as well as Times op-ed page editor Andy Rosenthal, and we'll let you know what we find out.

I was reminded of Brooks's great insight watching a panel yesterday on C-Span of a December 8 conference at Yale on the Senate battle between Lamont and Lieberman, won by the wily Lieberman.

A good show. And it hardly mattered that the campaign was 6 weeks old. The wound is raw. David Brooks is dead on.

1. Brooks is an exponent of the globelites (as I am of the isopops); and let's be clear, his elite truly is an elite right now: it's a tiny minority. How many people maybe want to invade Iran? Or continue to rationalize the invasion of Iraq as a smart idea? Show of hands, please. Yet this elite is behind the wheel.

3. One of Brooks's professed idols is the late E. Digby Baltzell. The Penn sociologist will be forever famous for coining the term "WASP" in the 60s to describe the then-ruling elite. Forty years later, Brooks came up with his own acronym to describe the new elite: Bobos (for Bohemian bourgeois). Baltzell's acronym stuck, Brooks's is fast fading. Why? Bobos lacked WASP's sting. Bobos was a soft, lifestyle metric: Latte drinkers of the information age. By eliding the Jewishness of the new elite—and yes, Jews are just a component of the establishment, but a significant one—Brooks fell painfully short of his model.

In Brooks's book Bobos In Paradise, there are countless reference to WASPs, as the bad old order. 12 lines in his index for WASPs. 0 for Jews (who are only glanced upon in the text). I know why Brooks doesn't want to talk about Jewishness, let alone turn on his elite. He worries, as many of my intellectual friends do, about the pogroms that will take place in Des Moines the minute the media elite say what any boob watching CSpan accepts: Jews are an empowered group, and deservedly.

As Brooks showed, and the Lamont-Lieberman debate confirms, this is a huge and important divide. Inasmuch as the globelite cannot admit that the war in Iraq was a tragic error, at a time when midstream America has come solidly to that conclusion, the elite is growing estranged from public opinion, and thereby violating Baltzell's democratic principle, that it's OK and necessary to have a ruling elite, but it must be representative. This divide plays out in terms of the Jewish presence in American public life. The Jewish leadership is globelite all the way. It is more implicated in the disastrous Iraq decisionmaking than the realists, and less implicated in the war's grimmest consequences (there are more Buddhists than Jews in the armed forces, as I reported). Lamont/Lieberman was one wedge. Now comes another: Talk to Syria. Any realist will tell you we have to do that; the (largely non-Jewish) Iraq Study Group said so too. But Jewish leadership is against it. Bush will be too—next year. To be continued.

To the Editor:

Now that the Nationals have completed an awful season and the Mets are in the playoffs, Mr. Brooks has thrown a changeup, writing of the tortured life of an angst-ridden Mets fan.

Joseph Schick Flushing, Queens, Oct. 8, 2006