So, like when will David Brooks officially be on the Obama payroll?

Seriously. When was the last time the left’s/NYT’s favorite “Republican” columnist was even remotely tough on our celebrity President? This column just doesn’t cut it:

You’ll notice first that these two viewpoints are diametrically opposed. You’ll, observe, second, that they are entirely predictable. Political partisans always imagine the other side is ruthlessly effective and that the public would be with them if only their side had better messaging. And finally, you’ll notice that both views distort reality. They tell you more about the information cocoons that partisans live in these days than about Obama himself.

The fact is, Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy β€” from his book β€œThe Audacity of Hope” to his joint-session health care speech last September β€” he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market.

He has tried to find this balance in a town without an organized center β€” in a town in which liberals chair the main committees and small-government conservatives lead the opposition. He has tried to do it in a context maximally inhospitable to his aims.

But he has done it with tremendous tenacity. Readers of this column know that I’ve been critical on health care and other matters. Obama is four clicks to my left on most issues. He is inadequate on the greatest moral challenge of our day: the $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade. He has misread the country, imagining a hunger for federal activism that doesn’t exist. But he is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington.

Liberals are wrong to call him weak and indecisive. He’s just not always pursuing their aims. Conservatives are wrong to call him a big-government liberal. That’s just not a fair reading of his agenda.

Translation: If he had been then-Senator Barack Obama rubbing his hand up his inner thigh at some long ago luncheon and not some still-not-named Republican Senator, Brooks would have never ‘joked’ about it or revealed it – because he would have liked it.

The nauseating bromance continues. And I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth. I really can’t even attempt to take this guy – or anything he says – seriously anymore.

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