And so two nights ago when Barack broke bread with some conservative commentators at the home of George Will, they swooned and are now claiming bragging rights, even saying "he likes us best" because they had dinner with him while the next day liberal commentators met in his office and were only offered water.
Their bragging only shows them for the losers they are. And poor ones at that.
But Barack is bigger than that. Unlike Bush, who only wanted to be president of warmongers and neoconservatives and preachy moralists, Barack wants to be the president of the entire country. And he is willing to meet with them and share ideas.
To be fair, a few conservatives are humbled with the recent economic meltdown, some realizing that conservative ideology has failed. In David Brooks column today, for instance, he talks about the failure of the Republican belief that people behave rationally when it comes to business and financial decisions and that in fact human behavior is far more complicated and involves a certain amount of "mental chaos."
This mental chaos explains how people can respond so quickly and intuitively to so many different circumstances. But it also entails a decision-making process that is more complicated and messy than previously thought.
So David Brooks has finally admitted what Democrats have always known - that life is messy, people are imperfect, and sometimes radical freedom leads to disaster.
I wrote about this six years ago in an essay titled "Why I am not a Republican." The article is long, but if I were to write it today, I would add one other reason to the three I outlined. I am not a Republican because they only learn the hard way. Democrats are more progressive. They look ahead and try to prevent problems, while Republicans are faith and ideology based and refuse to consider that they might be wrong or they might not be addressing real problems. Only when disaster strikes are they forced to admit they were wrong, and often it is far too late.
I said of Republicans:
Republicans have a very black and white view of the nature of man. On the one hand, when promoting their economic policies, they appear to be stubborn believers in man's innate goodness. Their promotion of radical free markets, unregulated business, less governmental aid to the poor, lower taxes and privatizing social security, among other policies, is evidence of that. They insist that capitalism, left to itself, will be beneficial to all. Trickle down economics and radical individualism are republican mantras that assume that everyone has an equal shot at the "American Dream," that the wealthy will take care of the poor that didn't get trickled down on, and unregulated business can be trusted to do what's right. Republicans simply expect people to be good.
Of Democrats, I said:
Democrats, in my opinion, are more realistic about the nature of man. While democrats profess the belief that people CAN be good, and while they continue to
hope for the best, they accept that humans are ultimately flawed creatures, frequently selfish, weak and easily tempted to do wrong, especially when they get together in corporate board meetings. Because democrats do not expect people to be perfect, they understand the need for some governmental regulation. Sometimes, they think, man must be protected from himself - or more accurately, people must sometimes be protected from each other.
Thus, democrats believe in the importance of governmental oversight, especially of businesses that all citizens are dependent upon - like energy companies and the media. They also believe in the importance of protecting labor against unscrupulous management practices and so traditionally it has been the democratic party that has championed labor unions. Democrats are not so naive as to believe governments or unions always do the right thing, but they believe that these organizations are strengthened with the power of many voices and can hammer out reasonable and balanced policies as long as negotiations aren't done in secret.
