NO WAY PALIN DREW ANY MORE THAN, MAYBE, 6,000. You can't find 60,000
non-constipated people in that part of Florida!

AND NOW EVEN CONSERVATIVES ARE WARNING AMERICANS ABOUT PALIN ...

"The Palin nomination has been a moment of truth for the right. While
many conservatives have embraced her as a fresh-faced reformer, a
handful -- David Frum, George Will and Charles Krauthammer among them
-- have questioned her meager experience. In the heat of a close
election, their defection is as unusual as the small number of liberal
columnists who have criticized Obama."

"Palin 'has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a
repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to
compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive
decisiveness.' "

When it came time to judge the Alaska governor's fitness for high
office, however, [David] Brooks watched her ABC interviews and turned
thumbs down. 'She looked fine,' he said, 'but not like someone I'd be
comfortable with as president in time of war.' "

-----------------
"David Brooks, Rankling Folks Right and Left"

"Conservative Pundit Hears It From Both Sides"

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 22, 2008; C01

David Brooks is used to hanging around with liberals -- his wife and
three children, among others, support Barack Obama -- but has grown
angry at the condescending talk about Sarah Palin.

"Three times someone told me they thought she was trailer trash," the
New York Times columnist said.

When it came time to judge the Alaska governor's fitness for high
office, however, Brooks watched her ABC interviews and turned thumbs
down. "She looked fine," he said, "but not like someone I'd be
comfortable with as president in time of war."

An erudite author and talking head, Brooks, 47, is sometimes cast as
the left's favorite conservative. At times he seems to delight in
taking on his own side, drawing fire from the likes of Rush Limbaugh,
and yet he drives some liberals up the wall.

"I look at a lot of commentary, and so much of it is campaign advocacy
for one side or another," he said. "That turns me off in a visceral
way." Brooks pronounces himself "disappointed" in both Obama and John
McCain.

The Palin nomination has been a moment of truth for the right. While
many conservatives have embraced her as a fresh-faced reformer, a
handful -- David Frum, George Will and Charles Krauthammer among them
-- have questioned her meager experience. In the heat of a close
election, their defection is as unusual as the small number of liberal
columnists who have criticized Obama.

Brooks wrote last week that Palin "has not been engaged in national
issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like
President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience
with brashness and excessive decisiveness."

Radio host Laura Ingraham distributed an e-mail chiding Brooks for
elitism. "Sarah Palin might not have read all the books David Brooks
has read, but she has an ability to galvanize an electorate," she says
now.

While Ingraham likes Brooks, she describes him as "a conservative
intellectual of the East Coast variety who thinks everyone else should
be more intellectual. I'm sure there are a lot of people who don't
know David who think he's a snob. He spends a lot of time around a lot
of people with similar backgrounds."

Brooks often displays his witty side on television, where he has a
regular debating slot on PBS's "NewsHour" and appears on such programs
as "Meet the Press" and "Face the Nation."

"There's a happy tweediness about him," said Washington Post columnist
E.J. Dionne, a regular sparring partner on National Public Radio.
"He's half-intellectual, half-'Saturday Night Live.' He veers back and
forth between academic studies and great lines from stand-up."

National Review's Frum, a longtime friend, praises "the suppleness of
his mind and a really warm personality." As for criticism from the
right, Frum said, "David always seems so affable and fun-loving that
you assume he's unbothered."

Perhaps Brooks's greatest apostasy was briefly falling for Obama,
based on "interviews I had with him before he became the Messiah. I
found him tremendously intelligent. I came away thinking, 'Man, he
agrees with everything I think.' We talked about Burke and Niebuhr and
all the philosophers I really like and he really likes." Republican
senators, Brooks said, "viciously pounded me" for his defection.

Brooks hailed Obama for winning the Iowa caucuses, writing in January
that he had achieved "something remarkable" and that "Americans are
not going to want to see this stopped. When an African-American man is
leading a juggernaut to the White House, do you want to be the one to
stand up and say No?"

In urging a broader, more moderate GOP, Brooks ran afoul of Limbaugh,
who opposed McCain's nomination and called the columnist part of an
"establishment" interested only in Beltway influence. "Mr. Brooks,
we're trying to save this party," Limbaugh told his listeners.

Within months, Brooks grew disillusioned, calling Obama a combination
of "Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent
this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set" and "Fast Eddie
Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who'd throw you
under the truck for votes." But he was hardly a Republican
cheerleader: Days before Obama picked his running mate, Brooks urged
the choice of Joe Biden as an experienced if loudmouthed lawmaker.

Brooks swooned over McCain during the 2000 campaign ("Even by the
standards of the media, I was more worshipful than most"), has dined
with him a number of times and admires McCain's closest confidant,
Mark Salter. When Brooks criticizes the McCain campaign, the pushback
comes "very respectfully," he says, mostly in the form of private e-
mails.

The son of two liberal college professors, Brooks grew up in Greenwich
Village in the 1960s and was a self-described socialist when he
arrived at the University of Chicago. He penned a parody of William F.
Buckley that impressed the National Review founder sufficiently to
offer him a job. Brooks called and accepted the offer years later, in
1984, by which time he had become a fan of Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher.

Brooks was tapped as the Wall Street Journal's op-ed editor after five
years in Brussels for the paper, and he joined the Weekly Standard
when Rupert Murdoch launched the magazine in 1995. He also made his
mark as a cultural observer with the book "Bobos in Paradise: The New
Upper Class and How They Got There."

Brooks backed the invasion of Iraq, praising President Bush for
remaining "resolute." He says now that "I was too enthusiastic. I
betrayed or neglected the core conservative principle that social
change is really complicated. Iraqi society was more complex than I
anticipated, and the attempt to radically reshape the country was
doomed to fall victim to our own ignorance."

But some liberals still view him as a neocon apologist. "No matter
what polls or elections show," Salon's Glenn Greenwald wrote last
year, "Brooks' overriding goal is to 'prove' that 'most Americans'
favor a 'hawkish' foreign policy whereby America will rule the world
by military force."

When Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. offered him an op-ed spot
soon after the 2003 invasion, Brooks wanted to turn it down, figuring
it would be hard to compress his ideas to column length. But, he said,
"I had a failure of courage." He enjoyed the increased access and
visibility of being a Timesman, but there was a downside.

"Until I took this job, I was never hated on a mass scale," Brooks
said.

Within months, he served notice that he was not a cultural right-
winger. He wrote a column making the conservative case for gay
marriage. Despite such nods to the other side, his fiercest critics
are on the left.

"Sometimes liberals get really mad at David because they expect him to
know better," Dionne said.

Brooks, who is working on a book about social mobility that includes
brain research, admits he is something of a throwback. "This is going
to sound pretentious, but I try to be a 1950s public intellectual in
2008, in 800 words."

But he is no ivory-tower thinker. Brooks went to the conventions in
Denver and St. Paul, Minn., pumps his sources for off-the-record
information and has joined conservative pundits in conversations with
Bush. Is he too deeply embedded in the establishment? "We have to get
close in order to learn things, but not get sucked in," he said.
"Sometimes we fall into the trap of sucking up and censoring
ourselves."

Whatever his journalistic gifts, not every audience can be persuaded.
After Brooks gave a lukewarm review of Obama's convention speech on
PBS, his wife, Sarah, texted him from their Bethesda home: "You are
crazy. That was great." What was worse, she reported that their 9-
year-
old son, Aaron, had said: "For the first time, I really disagree with
Daddy."

That, Brooks said, "was like a knife stuck in my heart."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/21/AR2008092102138....