David Brooks Finds a Woman

 And not just any woman.  No siree!  

This one is smart.  Facts and figures smart.  And she has political savvy.  And she may have what it takes to unite the fractious tribes of the Republican party and regain the glory it lost over the past few years. 

And that woman is...

You want me to say "Nikki Haley", don't you?  And you want me to quote from this New York Times thing from last week, don't you?

Nikki Haley Is the Best Trump Alternative

By David Brooks

I have a bunch of friends and acquaintances who are Never Trump, maybe-Trump or kind-of-Trump Republicans.

 And maybe intersperse this wretched column with comments like, bragging about your 'bunch' of friendships with fascists, and proto-fascists and fascist-adjacents isn't the flex you think it is David. 

They’ve been looking around for the candidate they can support and give their dollars to, somebody who is an antidote to Donald Trump and who can win a general election.

And comments like, that person is named Joe Biden, dummy. 

We’ve had endless conversations about who this person might be. Many of these friends and acquaintances went through a Ron DeSantis phase. A few like the No Labels third candidate option. I’ve often found myself talking up Tim Scott with them. If Trump is a moral stain, I would say, Tim Scott is the kind, honest and optimistic remedy.

But Wednesday’s debate persuaded me that the best Trump alternative is not Scott, it’s Nikki Haley...

I look forward to your TED Talk about the collective dark night of the soul all 17 of you went through before deciding to throw you money into the Haley bonfire instead of the Scott bonfire.  And doesn't this represent a hilarious reversal of the story you tell about the day you became a Republican. From David Brooks' address to Brigham-Young University, October 22, 2019:

My life started out in unpredictable form. I grew up in Greenwich Village in the 1960s to somewhat left-wing parents. When I was five, they took me to a Be-In, where hippies would just go to be. One of the things they did at the Be-In was set a garbage can on fire and throw their wallets into it to demonstrate their liberation from money and material things. I saw a $5 bill on fire in the garbage can, so I broke from the crowd, reached into the fire, grabbed the money, and ran away. That was my first step over to the right.

But you would be wrong, wrong, wrong.  I'm not going to do any of that, because the woman David Brooks found who can steer the Republican party out of its death spiral is not 2023's Nikki Haley.  

It's 2010's Meg Whitman.

You say you have no memory whatsoever of Meg "The Meg" Whitman?  Well that's kinda the point, isn't it? Brooks is always finding saviors of the Republican party who always come a cropper, just as Brooks is always spotting the Very Big Conservative Renaissance just over the horizon which never actually arrives.  And that is literally all he has done for the past 20 years, because Brooks doesn't do "journalism" in any sense of the word.  Instead  Brooks writes uplifting political fairy tales for his "bunch of friends and acquaintances who are Never Trump, maybe-Trump or kind-of-Trump Republicans" who are wealthy enough and dopey enough go to right on tossing bales of cash onto the pyres of doomed political campaigns year after year after year.

So let me remind you who Meg Whitman was.  Or, rather, let 2010 Davis Brooks, starting off with another relic from the Before Time which you may not remember.  Back during the Tea Bagger days when Very Serious Opinion-Havers like David Brooks were still pretending the GOP gave a shit about deficits.  It was called "austerity caucus".

The Austerity Caucus

By David Brooks

Sept. 30, 2010

Then came the predictable laundry list of material possessions

If I had as much money as Meg Whitman, I’d probably have a more exuberant house. Hers is perfectly nice. But at a time when other Silicon Valley moguls were installing underground squash courts, arcade-size game rooms and other gewgaws, she stuck with a New England-style colonial. The furniture is traditional. There’s a middle-age Ford in the garage. There are definite signs of WASP parsimony and understatement here...

 Yes, Meg is definitely grown up and sensible!

She was the grown-up chief executive hired to look after financial discipline, management structure, customer analysis and other spheres of eat-your-veggies sensibleness.

And she's also a smarty!

The only hint of disorder in her house is on the dining room table, where there are stacks of briefing books piled askew. Whitman doesn’t exactly soar into the realm of poetry when she talks about what she’d like to do if elected governor. But if you ask her about the need for earthquake-proof water levies or the intricacies of budget rules, you will be greeted with a torrent of figures. 

But don't be fooled by her green eyeshades!  The Meg is the coming thing in the GOP!

But Whitman is representative of an emerging Republican type -- what you might call the austerity caucus.

 Despite flashier creatures like the Scintilla from Wasilla -- 

Flamboyant performers like Sarah Palin get all the attention...

 -- David Fucking Brooks knows where the secret soul of the GOP resides:

... but the governing soul of the party is to be found in statehouses where a loose confederation of über-wonks have become militant budget balancers.

And who are these mighty slipstick jockeys who will lead David Brooks' Republican party into their glorious future?

There's this guy:

Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana who I think is most likely to win the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 2012, is the spiritual leader. 

And this guy:

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is the rising star. 

And this guy:

Jeb Bush is the eminence. 

And these guys: 

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Rob Portman, a Senate candidate in Ohio, also fit the mold.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming of St. Reagan is at hand.   
The Second Coming! An "Avengers, Assemble!" moment 

for the Republican Budget Cutters!

 And let's not leave out the helpers and sidekicks who keep these heroes' armor polished and bright.

They’re being assisted by budget experts from the Hoover Institution, the Manhattan Institute and freelancers like Bob Grady, who did budgeting in George H.W. Bush’s administration.

Then comes four paragraphs about Chris Christie, all of which I will spare you, but this:

Christie is the Hot New Thing...

Ew. 

Then, at last, back to The Meg:

...Whitman has the personality type that you’re seeing more and more of these days. Not big picture, like Reagan. Not an idea volcano, like Gingrich. Not a straightforward man of faith, like George W. Bush. The quintessential New Republican is detail-oriented, managerial, tough-minded, effective but a little dry.

As the raging, racist soul of the Republican party was bursting out the closet and into public view in the form of Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, Brooks went looking for the next Republican savior everywhere but right in front him, and found  "The quintessential New Republican is detail-oriented, managerial, tough-minded, effective but a little dry." 

In 2009, it was John Thune, who stole Mr. Brooks' punch-drunk heart with his olive oil voice and Guinea charm down-home, prairie values and manly bilateral symmetry.  Like Ms. Whitman, Mr. Thune was a leading member of the invisible-to-everyone-but-David-Brooks Very Serious Shadow Party that Mr. Brooks is perpetually discovering rumbling around in the "bowels" of the GOP like bad fish tacos.

In that case. Mr. Brooks' reportage on La Thune bordered on the stalkerish.  Or, as one wag put it at the time, a  "...farrago of unattributed, saccharine "everybody knows", "people say" and Third Person Omniscient declaratives."   

After The Meg, it was Rubio! who Mr. Brooks celebrated in print with another round of oxygen-starved self-abuse:

The Republican Glasnost 

By DAVID BROOKS 

Published: December 6, 2012 

Senator Marco Rubio won the Jack Kemp Foundation’s Leadership Award earlier this week. In his speech accepting the award, he sketched out his Republican vision. 

...the speech really began to sing toward the end.

And by 2016 it was [checks notes], well I'll be damned, still Rubio.  David Brooks, January 2016:  "It's going to be Rubio!  I'm telling you, it's going to be Rubio!"

Now let's jog back from 14 years ago ... and 13 years ago ... and seven years ago ... to the same fucking guy writing about the same fucking political party for the same fucking paper:

Wednesday’s debate illustrated the cancer that is eating away at the Republican Party. It’s not just Trumpian immorality. The real disease is narcissistic hucksterism. The real danger is that he’s creating generations of people, like Vivek Ramaswamy, who threaten to dominate the G.O.P. for decades to come.

And then, this hilarious tsk-tsking of Mike Pence and rest of the Republican field for (I kid you not) not being realistic about the state of the GOP from a guy who as never in his entire professional life been anything other than aggressively delusional about the state of the GOP:

Pence, like many in the field, is still living in the age of Reagan, or at the latest, the Tea Party. They haven’t reoriented their focus to the sorts of concerns that are most important to heartland voters without a college degree. They don’t understand why the old Republican orthodoxy was so fragile in the face of Trump. They haven’t faced the new realities that have emerged this century.

So, after all of that, is Nikki Haley the "Best Alternative to Trump"?

Has Haley? Too soon to tell.

Bwahahahaha!

But if any of my friends and acquaintances want to stop Trump, this is their moment to give Haley her chance. 

Quick question:  What is The New York Times' policy on op-ed writers using their columns to write  begging letters urging their wealthy fascist, and proto-fascist and fascist-adjacent friends to pour money into a specific candidate's Super PAC?  

Because, stripped of all its embroidery, that's all this is: a fundraising letter aimed directly at Brooks rich pals and patrons, delivered via The New York Times op-ed page.