Barrel Strength

2006

In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”

2011

“Shambles, a complete meltdown, apparently,” Brooks said. “I’ve never seen a presidential press conference with the president so angry in public. And you know, I sort of think he’s maybe mostly right on substance. He laid out apparently in the next few hours they are he going to be laying out the details of what the White House offer was. And there was a lot of revenue cuts, there was some spending cuts, there was entitlement cuts, revenue increase. So if those are real, then I think it was a pretty good deal. But the president’s tone of being the only adult in Washington, everyone else is a child, that he’s going to summon people to the White House as if they are kindergarteners, even if you agree on the substance, it’s kind of hard to go along with someone who is insulting you all the time. And so I think the president took a big risk. Maybe we will see his tone as he is giving it to them. He’s angry. He’s treating them like children. But a lot of people will take a look at it and say there’s a little arrogance and self-superiority there.”