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The Conversation

The Republican Party In Triumph

By David Brooks and Gail Collins
Kayana Szymczak/Getty Images
The Conversation

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

David Brooks: Well, that was pretty much a complete drubbing.

Gail Collins: Don’t rub it in, David.

David: I guess the Republicans will pick up between eight and 10 Senate seats once the dust settles in Alaska, Virginia and Louisiana. The victories at the gubernatorial level are even more impressive. Scott Walker’s win in Wisconsin was pretty significant. The biggest surprise to me was Larry Hogan getting himself elected governor of thoroughly blue Maryland. Plus Bruce Rauner’s win as governor of Illinois was unexpected and huge. This was a national verdict.

Gail: Yeah, things were even worse than I expected. The most depressing result, for me, was Sam Brownback being re-elected governor in Kansas. If you can wreck the state’s economy and not get punished at all — I don’t know what there is to say.

David: It seems to me the Republican challenge is to understand what the party has done right without getting carried away by triumphalism. The Democratic challenge is to understand where the party went wrong without giving way to despair. Maybe we can talk about strengths and weaknesses?

Gail: Well, I guess that’s better than staying here under the bed, curled in a fetal position. You first.

David: I guess the beginning of Republican wisdom is to understand that this was more a case of the Democrats’ losing this particular election than it was a case of the Republicans winning it. The Democrats have talked a lot about wage stagnation and income inequality but they have offered nothing compelling to address these problems. President Obama lost the House four years ago because he seemed too liberal for the country after the passage of Obamacare. He lost the Senate this year because he seemed too passive, not competent, not in control. The rollout of Obamacare was the crucial moment of his second term.

Gail: I agree that the president has often seemed passive. And there’s been a lot of misspeaking for somebody who’s supposed to be a great communicator. But I don’t buy the idea that the Democrats failed to address wage stagnation and income inequality. Raise the minimum wage, create good jobs improve the nation’s roads and bridges, expand quality pre-K programs to give the next generation a boost – that’s pretty much all they talked about.

David: The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way. The wins in purple states like North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are clear indications that the party can at least gain a hearing among swing voters. And if the G.O.P. presents a reasonable candidate (and this year’s crop was very good), then Republicans can win anywhere. I think we’ve left the Sarah Palin phase and entered the Tom Cotton phase.

Gail: I wouldn’t call this year’s crop very good, except in the sense that they’re definitely a less extreme group than we saw in the last few seasons. Although some – like Joni Ernst, who won the Senate seat in Iowa – are still downright scary.

But the Republicans have gotten very good at teaching their candidates how to tamp down political screechiness.

David: I was especially struck by Ed Gillespie’s amazing showing in Virginia. He ran one of the more policy-oriented campaigns in the country. At a time when consultants around the nation insulted voters’ intelligence with dumb campaigns, he honored their intelligence by talking about policy and was rewarded for it, win or lose. Maybe it takes a guy who has been a professional consultant to not listen to the consultants.

Gail: Virginia shocked me. And Kay Hagan’s loss in North Carolina saddened me. The new Democratic South seems to exist mainly in theory.

David: Scott Walker’s victory in Wisconsin is also significant. The public is clearly unhappy with public sector unions, even in a traditionally progressive place like Wisconsin. Faced with a budget crisis, a mayor or governor can take on those unions and survive and even thrive. He’ll become a compelling national figure in 2016.

Gail: Yeah, when the only unions left standing are the ones composed of people who work for the taxpayers, the labor movement is in a pretty sad shape. The Republicans have done a very good job of making it almost impossible to organize in the private sector.

David: I wouldn’t give up on private sector unions. I suspect some institution will grow up to give workers more bargaining power against employers, even if it doesn’t look like the 20th-century model.

Republicans should be wary of over-interpreting their mandate. Scott Brown ran hard against immigration reform and he was a rare Republican loser last night.

Gail: That seemed like a weird choice of themes for New Hampshire, but maybe Brown just forgot which state he was campaigning in. I will refrain from making any jokes about how his next move will be to buy a camper and head for California, where Barbara Boxer is up for re-election in 2016. There will always be a woman running for the Senate somewhere who he can challenge.

David: I would love to see a Brown-Boxer race. Sort of a setup for a U.P.S. advertising campaign. The deeper problem for Republicans is their party still has no growth agenda. Figuring out a set of policies commensurate with the size of the structural economic issues is the next big task.

Gail: See, that’s the frustrating thing. For the last two years the Senate has had Democratic committee chairs who went out of their way to work with Republicans on economic issues. But they were stonewalled by the Republican leadership. And then the voters blamed the Democratic incumbents for gridlock.

David: For Democrats, I guess one big lesson is: Stop talking to each other. Democratic politicians spent the early part of the year running against the Koch brothers. That argument may scare a lot of people in liberal bastions, but no one outside of these bastions knows about them or cares.

Gail: It’s totally true that politicians and the media care much more about campaign contributors than voters do I always secretly thought that if God wanted Americans to care about campaign finance reform he would have made it easier to explain. Although there was that one brief, shining moment in 2000 – John McCain. Presidential primary. New Hampshire. Amazing to think back on how that one guy in a bus just went from town meeting to town meeting talking about how to get money out of politics.

Gone but not quite forgotten.

David: Then the Democrats came back with the 2012 playbook — all the talk about contraception and “women’s” issues. That was tone deaf, given where the country is.

Gail: I don’t agree at all. Of course you can’t give the impression that reproductive rights is the only thing you’re running on. But the real problem for the Democrats was that the Republicans figured out how to defuse the issue.Ask me about abortion and I’ll tell you that birth control pills should be sold over the counter.

The Democrats aren’t going to have the luxury of running against the kind of Cro-Magnon candidates the Republicans were putting up a few years ago. Although I was tickled to see that the congressman in Florida who held the men-only gathering went down the drain. You know, the one who felt guys needed to be by themselves so they could feel free to drink, smoke and discuss serious topics.

David: Democrats also need to ask themselves what it will take for them to be a congressional party once again. That means winning in places likes Arkansas, once solid Democratic states. Over the near term it means shelving theories about an emerging Democratic majority — hoping that a tide of Democratic voters will sweep the Democrats into permanent power. That still may happen over the long term, but Democrats are just terrible at appealing to white voters, especially less-educated white voters.

Gail: No matter what the demographics of the future are going to look like, you obviously want candidates who can appeal to poor white and poor minority candidates at the same time. But it’s not easy to do. I don’t think the Republicans are meeting uneducated white voters’ needs. They’re just appealing to their fear of change.

David: The core problem for Democrats, it seems to me, is that voters are just too skeptical of government — at least as it currently exists. Obamacare may not have been a huge issue, but Republicans ran lots of ads about it, and it remains deeply unpopular. Democrats somehow need to figure out how to offer government programs when people are innately suspicious of government as something alien and ineffective.

Gail: The Republicans have done a terrific job of making their base hate government, even when they benefit greatly from government programs. And it’s ironic that President Obama, who ran as a great communicator, has been so awful at countering that message.

David: The final point is that this election marks the end of the Obama presidency’s power on the domestic front. In 2008, I would not have expected it to come to this. The verdict is still out on what Obama’s legacy will be, but it’s certainly true that he did not succeed where F.D.R., Reagan and even Clinton did — in building a plausible majority for his party.

Gail: I know that the rule of our pundit profession is that now we must turn our attention completely away from the current administration and do nothing but speculate about the presidential race in 2016. But I want to give Obama a little more time before I declare him a goner. If he leaves behind a national health care program and a significant start to the battle against climate change, he’ll have actually accomplished much more as president than Clinton did. But I guess the nation won’t learn to appreciate him unless he’s impeached.

The Conversation

Political Infections

By David Brooks and Gail Collins
The Conversation

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Barack Obama hugs the nurse and Ebola survivor Nina Pham in the Oval Office on Oct. 24. Pool photo by Olivier Douliery

Gail Collins: David, I was pretty confident that the United States had Ebola under control until the other day, when it appeared policy-making had devolved to Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie. Chris Christie, who can’t keep bridge traffic moving. Andrew Cuomo, who failed to get his 2012 flu shot until 2013.

David Brooks: This is why we’re a republic and not a democracy. People running for office should not be making science policy. By the way, I’ve been against quarantines and overreaction through this whole thing, but there was a piece in The New Republic a few weeks ago that sobered me. Steven Beutler, an infectious disease specialist, was arguing for a maximalist response. Here’s one core point: “Medicine can be a very humbling profession, and after more than 30 years of practicing infectious-disease medicine, I have learned that the ‘unanticipated’ happens all too often, especially where microbes are involved.”

Gail: Do you think the Ebola hysteria will have any effect on next week’s election? There’s been a lot of complaint about the administration’s ineptitude. But I think the message on Ebola, at least, has been the opposite. Ebola in the United States began deep in the heart of Texas, a state whose health care system is so estranged from the federal government it refuses to accept the opportunity to get its millions of uninsured residents covered under Obamacare.

David: Your love of all things Texas is well known. But you have to admit a few things about the place. It is economically vibrant beyond all reckoning. Houston and Dallas are exploding economically while the rest of the country dawdles.

Gail: Texas is the last gasp of the Sunbelt boom. It has all the advantages of warm weather, plus an enormous amount of space which makes housing stupendously cheap. It could have done just as well without being politically crazy.

But we were talking about Ebola. Read more…

The Conversation

What Would Edmund Burke Say?

By David Brooks and Gail Collins
The Conversation

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

David Brooks: Gail, as you know I have a policy of teaching at colleges I couldn’t have gotten into, and as a result I find myself teaching at Yale.

Gail Collins: I didn’t go to Yale either. But I spent the ’70s living in New Haven. Does that count for anything?

David: I just got out of a class in which we discussed Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” As you may know, this book changed my life. I began reading it as a big lefty and I loathed Burke. But over the years, I came to see wisdom in it. Have there been big books like that for you, which had a pivotal effect on your thinking?

Gail: When I was in high school, I decided I needed to read the work of a great mind on the subject of politics. I picked Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Mandate for Change” because at the time I believed that all presidents were deep thinkers.

Carried that sucker around for six months. Read every page. There wasn’t much philosophy, but I did learn that if we lost Vietnam we would forgo an important source of tin.

I believe this had a crippling effect on my ability to appreciate genuine political philosophy when it was thrust upon me in later life. And I want to say how impressed I am that after reading “Reflections on the Revolution in France” and not liking it, your response was to read it again.

David: Burke is famous for his belief in gradual change. He didn’t believe in revolutionary change because he thought that society was too complicated to be planned through reason and remade according to that plan. My students were divided on this. Some saw wisdom in this modesty, pointing to failed efforts to remake societies, ranging from the war in Iraq to the Russian revolution. Others pointed out that most systems are constructed by those in power for those in power. If you don’t have radical change, you just allow entrenched privilege to stay in power forever.

Did you ever go through a revolutionary phase? Are you still in one?

Gail: When I was in college and graduate school I hung around with a lot of people who believed that revolution was both necessary and inevitable. That was less because I agreed than because I felt they were much nicer than the folks who believed things were just peachy the way they were.

David: Burke is known as the founder of conservatism, but his thought sits oddly these days with the Republican Party and those who call themselves conservative. The party has become much more populist, supporting term limits and political outsiders over those who have been educated by experience. Most call for pretty radical change to the welfare state. It’s the Democrats who fight to preserve the current structures of Social Security, Medicare and food stamps. It’s the Democrats who have been running ads through this election campaign accusing their opponents of being a bunch of wild-eyed radicals. Are Democrats now the conservators of tradition?

Gail: The difference between the two parties is about empty places versus crowded places. You have heard me say this before – it’s my long-standing theory, which takes the place of a political philosophy.

People who perceive the world as a crowded place believe that government has a very important role to play. They see it in action every day – enforcing the law, directing traffic, removing garbage and providing clean water. They’re also likely to witness the inequality of the world and they want government to at least make the divisions less painful.

The current crop of Republicans, especially the Tea Party types, see the world as an empty place, where people can take care of themselves and government exists only to levy taxes and get in their way. Given the fact that the country is becoming increasingly crowded, I don’t think you can define that as a message of change.

David: I do think Republicans are seen as the party of change this election. My sense is that in state after state, polls are swinging their way. The peculiarities of each candidate matter a bit less and the national tide is mattering a bit more. I’d now guess that the G.O.P. will pick up seven or eight Senate seats. It’s just hard to be a Democrat in a red state or a Republican in a blue state. Do you have a different read on the trends?

Gail: I suspect you may be right about the outcome. The Democrats are in trouble in states where a large number of people either live in empty places or tell themselves they do. There’s a lot of delusion in this game – we’ve all seen the guy who lives on Social Security and depends on Medicare for his visits to the doctor, yelling that he wants government off his back.

David: I’m not sure either party has an agenda.

Gail: You don’t think announcing that terrorists are infecting themselves with Ebola and crossing the Mexican border is an agenda?

David: As you know I’ve been depressed by the vacuousness of the campaign.

Gail: Me too. Another one of my theories is that politics is at its worst when the country is almost evenly divided and each party thinks it can win if it just avoids saying anything.

David: But people do believe that things are pretty seriously off track, and so of course they are going to register some protest. Peter Wehner had a piece on the Commentary website that nicely sketched out how much the fundamentals favor the party out of power. It was called “America’s Anxious Mood and What It Means for Republicans.”

Wehner pointed to the drop in median household income, the fact that income inequality is nearing its highest levels in 100 years, the fact that the poverty rate has stood at 15 percent for three consecutive years (the first time that has happened since the mid-1960s), the fact that a record number of people are now on food stamps and the fact that only a quarter of people think the country is on the right track.

I sort of agree that Republican proposals on what to do about all this are less than, er, fully developed, and have not been fully explained. But isn’t it an indictment of the Obama administration that it has made so little progress even on, say, reducing the poverty rate?

Gail: Well, Obama did run on the argument that our biggest problem was too much partisanship in Washington, and that he’d cure that by being less partisan. So I guess you could blame him for the fact that that definitely did not work.

I give Obama credit for the fact that we’ve gotten out of the recession, which never would have happened if the Republicans had their way. I guess I blame him for not actually being the kind of great communicator we needed to explain that the keys to reducing inequality lie in more government spending and higher taxes on the wealthy.

David: Wehner also points out that two-thirds of Americans think it is harder to reach the American dream, and three-quarters think it will be harder for their children and grandchildren to succeed. Of course they’re going to favor the party out of power in such conditions.

Gail: Yes, and we may just keep switching parties without ever resolving anything.

David: All of this may be reason for some sort of radical change — maybe a Rand Paul type change or an Elizabeth Warren type change.

Gail: Ah, Rand Paul. What this country needs is a libertarian who believes the government has no right to control anything except women’s reproductive systems.

David: If I was 25 I wonder if I’d be a radical libertarian or even a Marxist on the ground that a country that has been on the wrong track for so long needs a sharp kick in the pants.

Gail: This is possible. I’d say a 25-year-old who reads a lot of political philosophy is capable of anything.

David: But I’m sticking to my Burkean roots. Change should be steady, constant and slow. Society has structural problems, but they have to be reformed by working with existing materials, not sweeping them away in a vain hope for instant transformation. My only fear is that if I keep thinking this way I’ll end up voting for Hillary Clinton, who will be the most conservative candidate from the party of the status quo.

Gail: Tee-hee.

David: That can’t be right.

Gail: No, but I’m sure Hillary will be happy to accept your vote anyway.

The Conversation

Independents’ Day

By David Brooks and Gail Collins
The Conversation

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Mike Rounds, running for the Senate in South Dakota as a Republican, finds himself in a three-way race. Ryan Henriksen for The New York Times

Gail Collins: David, you’ve been enthusiastic about the Senate race in Kansas, where an independent, Greg Orman, became a surprise front-runner. Now the same kind of thing seems to be happening in South Dakota. Are you excited?

David Brooks: Have you ever heard of negative panic? In times of chaos or extreme excitement, before a fire or an oncoming tornado, some people act with extreme calm, as if everything is normal. Their brains just don’t know how to handle the extreme circumstances so they pretend those circumstances don’t exist. Many people die because they don’t take the simple evasive action that would save their lives.

I am so excited by the prospect of an independent candidate in South Dakota that I am behaving as if everything is normal. I give off the appearance of extreme calm. But deep down I’m rippling with excitement. Next to me John Thune and Tom Daschle seem manic.

Gail: I may have gotten carried away. I remember now that I recently humiliated myself by announcing how thrilled I was by a Senate candidate debate in Iowa.

But we’ve only got three more weeks of this election season, so you have to humor me. In South Dakota, Mike Rounds, the Republican Senate candidate, was supposed to win. Then he got mired in a scandal. It’s one of those extremely complicated matters that we in the media try to summarize with a phrase like “allegations of corruption.”

David: Do you know that South Dakota was the last state among the 48 that I have visited? Now I’ve been there a few times. What impresses me about the place is that the eastern and western sides of the state are rivals with each other. You’d think that there would be so much resentment north/south in the Dakotas that they wouldn’t have time for east/west. I guess the winters are long.

I don’t know why I mention this except that I think people would be more forgiving toward Mike Rounds if there was more of a love-thy-neighbor mentality.

Gail: Well, Rounds hasn’t run any attack ads because he feels South Dakotans don’t like that tone. Although to be fair, until recently he didn’t think he had any competition. People who are basically running unopposed love the high road.

The Democrat, Rick Weiland, has been running as a populist-liberal, and until recently the national party rewarded him for his principled candidacy by ignoring his race entirely. Then Larry Pressler, a former Republican senator now turned independent, began to get traction. Now anything seems possible.

David: I love the fact that Pressler is back, once again disproving the most untrue truism in American literature, that there are no second acts in American life.

Gail: Oh my gosh, I totally agree with you. Bill Clinton alone has had about fifteen second acts.

David: Pressler is on his seventh or eighth act. The guy was a Rhodes Scholar, a Vietnam vet. He first entered Congress before Jimmy Carter was president. That’s a long time ago. He was also the senator who came off looking good during the Abscam scandal. Here’s a passage from a 1980 Washington Post story:

“Thanks to the F.B.I.’s undercover ‘sting’ operation, there now exists incontrovertible evidence that one senator would not be bought. Preserved among the videotape footage that may be used as bribery evidence against a number of members of Congress, there is a special moment in which Sen. Larry Pressler (R-SD) tells the undercover agents, in effect, to take their sting and stick it. Pressler, according to law enforcement sources, was the one approached member of Congress who flatly refused to consider financial favors in exchange for legislative favors, as suggested by undercover agents posing as Arabs. At the time he said he was not aware that he was doing anything quite so heroic.”

Gail: I do love listening to you read the news. And you brought back Abscam! It’s comforting, at minimum, to know there was at least one senator who didn’t immediately buy the phony-sheikh hustle.

David: So yes, I guess I have a soft spot for a guy like that who wants to re-enter the Senate. That said, I think it will be hard to stay up in the polls once the other guys set their sights on him.

Gail: So we agree South Dakota is – yes! – exciting. And I know you like the idea of electing bipartisan independents.

Here’s what worries me about that. There are already two official independents in the Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine. Suppose we wound up with a Senate that was 48-48-4? If the independents formed their own little caucus, they’d have the deciding votes on everything. The fate of every bill and nomination would depend on four guys from Kansas, South Dakota, Vermont and Maine. Four people whose states represent less than 2 percent of the American population.

David: Are you worried about this because the United States Senate is not a model of legislative excellence? I of course think the Senate is way more polarized than the country so it would be a good thing to have a little ballast in the center. Even if that ballast does come from extremely even-tempered states.

Gail: Do you think South Dakotans will be troubled by the fact that the independent Senate candidate Larry Pressler seems to actually live in Washington, D.C? At least he rents an apartment in Sioux Falls, which is more than Pat Roberts, the endangered Kansas senator, bothered to do.

David: I wished all senators lived in D.C. Congress worked better when its members couldn’t fly home every week. I don’t think it’s the time at home that ruins them; it’s the airport food.

I know people like me are always saying this, but I do think if members of the Senate were here for more than three days at a stretch they would actually learn to like each other a little more. Plus, members of Congress are not primarily in office to directly represent their constituents; they are in Congress to offer their best judgments on the issues of the day.

Gail: Well, sort of. Until the budget or the farm bill comes out, and everybody’s trying to figure out what it means to the folks in East Cupcake.

We do have a lot of close races that are roiled by residency issues this year. Besides South Dakota and Kansas, there’s Louisiana, where Senator Mary Landrieu’s official state residence is in her parents’ house. And in Alaska, the Republican Senate candidate is getting criticized for having what might be called shallow Alaskan roots.

David: We’ve got to start paying these people more. With Washington real estate prices shooting toward N.Y.C. levels, it’s expensive to maintain a home there and a house back in the home state. I really think this residency business is a crazy issue.

Gail: Maybe we could put up dorms. Nice big ones like colleges have for married graduate students.

This is the point at which I get nostalgic and recall that in one of the first elections I ever covered, one of the big issues was whether the voting address of the incumbent was actually a North Haven, Connecticut, Burger King outlet.

David: I didn’t know Chris Christie began his career in Connecticut.

Gail: Ach, low blow.

But it still seems to me that people are better off choosing between two parties that have reasonably clear, competing agendas — plus the ability, at least in theory, to deliver on some of their promises.

David: If one party or another had a total grip on the truth I’d agree with you. Hard issues usually require a balancing between competing values and competing legitimate interests. Independents, if they know their job, can help find this balance. If they don’t know their job they just waffle in the middle.

Gail: Well, I do admit that the last several seasons in Washington have not done a whole lot for my let-the-parties-deliver theory.

David: So true.

Gail: Maybe the good news from this election season is that Obamacare is fading as an issue. Can you foresee a time when the House will give up voting several dozen times a season to repeal it and actually start working with the other party to fix its weak spots?

I don’t want to force your opinion, but maybe I should point out that there are a lot of us who would grab onto a positive response as a tiny glimmer of hope in an otherwise hopeless election season.

David: Sorry. I do think health care inflation is declining, which is fabulous news, either because of Obamacare or some other reason. But I’m afraid this issue will be with us forever. When Larry Pressler stages his next comeback in 2056, we’ll still be talking about it.

The Conversation

The Peculiar Art of the Washington Memoir

By David Brooks and Gail Collins
The Conversation

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

David Brooks: I don’t know about you, but I stink at book titles. I sweat and struggle and I just can’t think of anything even slightly mediocre for my own opuses. I try to get inspired by the Internet lists of the best book titles ever. Some of them are humorous or mordant: “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” or “Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea” or “My Heart Is an Idiot.” Some of them are just beautiful: “Everything Is Illuminated” or “One Hundred Years of Solitude” or “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” They are all 500 times better than anything I’ve ever come up with.

Gail Collins: What do you mean? “Bobos in Paradise” was a great title. But I do sympathize. When I did my first history book about American women, it came down to a last-minute meeting with some editors and marketing folk. I couldn’t leave until we had an acceptable name. Which turned out to be “America’s Women.”

David: I mention this because while my title ideas are atrocious, they are not as bad as the titles given to Washington memoirs.

Gail: Before you go any further, let me tell you that my favorite title for a book by a Washington insider is “Adventures of a Nobody.” That was Louisa Adams, John Quincy’s wife. Not an easy guy to be married to, I believe. She also once complained about “the scorpion tongues of political scandal,” which I stole for a book I wrote on that subject. The only problem was that some book sellers apparently stocked “Scorpion Tongues” in the natural history section.

I apologize. You were saying about memoirs.

David: When you’re writing a Washington memoir, your goal, apparently, is to make sure everybody knows your book is as joyless as possible. You have to have a cover shot where you look gravely concerned and a title that suggests you are a lone and stalwart champion of weighty causes. Hillary Clinton’s title, “Hard Choices,” has all the uplift of a round chunk of lead, but for excessive gravitas I have to agree with the Washington Post reviewer David Ignatius that Leon Panetta’s title — “Worthy Fights” — sets a new standard.

Gail: Well, he wasn’t going to call it “Meaningless Battles.” Although there are a lot of folks in Washington who could write that book.

David: It’s odd because Panetta is the opposite of a ponderous guy. He’s very warm, engaging and down to earth. And he was a great public servant.

Gail: Hmm. Before you go any further, tell me what you think makes a great public servant in our current, ungreat, era.

David: You may agree or disagree with him on issues, but he had a skill that seems entirely absent these days, the ability to actually move people to do things. It starts with a psychological perceptiveness, knowing what people need. It continues with a sort of practical creativity — coming up with angles, proposals and situations that will bring disparate people behind a common effort. It also involves the ability to arouse affections, to motivate people to take action on your behalf. It’s amazingly rare.

Gail: You’re right. And isn’t it strange that people would go into politics without actually having those skills? Maybe it’s because politics these days is less and less about knowing how to interact with folks and more about knowing how to use the media and raise money.

David: What do you think of Panetta’s decision to publish a memoir while his administration is still in office? Bob Gates did it. Hillary did it. Now he has. I confess I disapprove. I do think there should be an unofficial rule. No memoirs until your president moves out. It’s important to protect internal deliberations.

Gail: I agree. I’d give Hillary a bit of a pass, given the fact that she went into the job as the most famous woman in the world, a former presidential candidate and a very likely candidate of the future. President Obama knew what he was getting.

But you don’t sign on to work in an administration and then go out and undermine the president while he’s still in office. And that’s what so many of them do. Leon Panetta goes on MSNBC promoting his book, and says: “Too often in my view the president relies on the logic of the law professor rather than the passion of a leader.” That may be true, but it’s not helping. Helping the administration’s foreign policy, I mean. Obviously writing about a sitting president helps sales.

David: It’s also striking to me that it’s the foreign policy advisers that are happiest to dish on Obama. They are the ones who were most unhappy with what they saw as the president’s passivity and indecision. Obama named activist, tough-minded people to the top foreign policy jobs, who came from a certain generation that took American interventionism for granted, but then pursued a policy inconsistent with their views.

Gail: I think he’s been more of an interventionist than voters might have expected, given the way he first got into office. Think about the surge in Afghanistan, Libya, all those drones.

I would suggest that the reason Obama is getting so beaten up by memoirists on foreign policy is because the foreign policy hasn’t worked. They aren’t trying to correct history – they’re trying to separate themselves from the failure. Which is another reason I agree with you about the unseemliness of publishing these memoirs while your old boss is still in office.

David: I think I’m developing an upstream, downstream view of public action. When the tide of history is going against you, when you are swimming upstream, then active interventionism is required. It’s perfectly obvious the world is going to have to get more involved in Iraq and Syria. Even after the U.S.-led bombing campaign, ISIS is still taking over new towns, like, apparently the border town of Kobani. This war is going to get bigger before it gets smaller.

Gail: I still keep dropping back and wondering if we shouldn’t leave this to the region. Let Iraq’s neighbors worry about Iraq, and let Turkey worry about Kobani. I may be way off base. But we’re having all these arguments about whether we should have soldiers fighting on the ground, and much less about whether these interventions ever work.

David: On the other hand, and on a happier note, I was delighted to see the Supreme Court take no action on those gay marriage cases. Here’s an example of where the tide of history is clearly flowing downstream. Leadership in this circumstance just means getting out of the way. That takes fine judgment and humility.

Gail: I noticed that Senator Ted Cruz called the Supreme Court’s decision to take no action “judicial activism at its worst.” Still more proof that the best definition of judicial activism is: “any decision I don’t like.”

David: I can’t help pointing out that this is exactly what the court did not do with Roe v. Wade. Instead of letting events take shape, the court arrogantly stopped debate and froze the two sides into extreme polarities. Such a bad decision, even from a pro-choice perspective. I suspect you disagree.

Gail: Give that man a cigar! You’re right, David. I totally disagree.

If states had been left to their own devices over the last few decades, I doubt very much you’d have seen the legislatures in, say, Texas or Mississippi, gradually coming around. Today, instead of eight clinics operating in Texas, there’d be none. Women in Mississippi who now have to travel to Jackson would probably have to find their way to New York or California. That’s not much of a problem for women with assets, but it’s the end of all options for the poor.

Abortion is exactly the kind of issue that requires the Supreme Court’s intervention. It involves a critical right; it’s politically toxic in many parts of the country and as a practical matter it mainly has an impact on the poor.

David: In any case, my overall point is that it’s always a mistake to trust people with dispositions that are permanent.

Gail: People who permanently have a disposition?

David: What I mean is that people who are always hyperactive will be terrible in certain circumstances and people who are always cautious will be terrible in others. The only people you can trust are those who let their means be governed by their circumstances.

Gail: I propose a different division – those who have really bad judgment and those who have really good judgment. The latter can be, well, judges. The former thrive on reality television. The rest of us will have to muddle along in the middle.

Maybe there’s a book in this. I’ll work up a proposal if you think up a title.

The Conversation

Swing State Envy, Anyone?

By David Brooks and Gail Collins
The Conversation

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Gail Collins: David, it’s less than five weeks until Election Day. And people are so — um — how would you characterize the mood?

David Brooks: Let’s see. Giddy with disinterest. Tingling with unconscious ennui. Quivering with apathy. I’d say the public mood is paradoxical.

Gail: Yet control of the Senate hangs in the balance! And it’s all up to the voters in five to 10 states, which neither you nor I inhabit.

David: I’m really glad to have been spared the agony of swing state envy. I’ve never lived in any state that isn’t solidly blue. So I’ve never known what it feels like to live in a place that has the excitement of competitive races. Hence I don’t feel the lack when that excitement goes away. You, coming from Ohio, are not so fortunate. Do you feel pain, perhaps in your wrists and other joints, watching faraway states get all the attention now that you live in a state of political indifference? Swing state envy is like a concussion, not to be underestimated. I think I may start wearing a purple wrist-band as a sympathy statement.

Gail: Our big New York news was that Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who’s up for re-election, found it necessary to go to Afghanistan this week. He sort of spun it as an effort to learn more about homeland security. But I honestly think you can do that in the homeland.

David: I’m presuming this was not a hiking the Appalachian Trail sort of thing. Maybe he went to curry favor with the Pashtun population in Rye. Or for the golfing.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan on Sept. 28. Kap Kim/Reuters



Gail: Meanwhile his opponent, whose name recognition is limited to his immediate family, reprised that old Lyndon Johnson “Daisy” ad where the little girl is picking petals off a flower and then suddenly – countdown to Armageddon! In this version, when the nuclear bomb goes off, Andrew Cuomo’s face comes out of the cloud.

Did not expect an ad about atomic warfare in the New York gubernatorial race. Possible high point of the political week for me. How about you? I know you’ve been taking the occasional gander at the big Senate races. What strikes you as interesting?

David: First the money. There’s been a ton of it, more than $228 million by outside groups alone so far. But the surprise in this post-Citizens-United era is that the Democrats are winning the money race so easily. I knew that the Democrats were the party of the rich plutocrats, but I didn’t realize how big the lead was. In North Carolina, pro-Democratic groups have a spending lead, $13 million to $8 million. In Iowa, the Democrats lead $9 million to $6 million. In Colorado, Democrats lead $10 million to $5 million. And so on in most states. If this continues Democrats are going to start loving that decision.

Gail: I hope it keeps going like this. I’d love to watch Mitch McConnell and John Boehner demand that we do something about the poison of “super PACs.”

Meanwhile, on the issues front, I’ve been fascinated by how much Republicans have come to love contraception. Really, if they get any more enthusiastic they’re going to start passing out condoms at the debates.

David: Or wearing them on their heads like Howie Mandel.

Gail: I’ve heard several Republican Senate candidates announce that they wanted to see birth control pills sold over the counter. This usually starts with a question about Obamacare – and the requirement that employers cover contraceptives in their health insurance plans. Then the Republican says that if birth control pills were sold like aspirin or Tums, they’d be much cheaper. Which may be true, although having them paid for by your insurance is certainly a better deal.

David: That’s clearly true. I’m struck, though, by how much the Democrats’ war-on-women charge against the G.O.P. doesn’t seem to be working. In the last Times poll, women were split down the middle, supporting Republicans almost as much as Democrats, 42-43.

Gail: They were still more Democratic-leaning than men. And I do think it’s working in some races, particularly the ones where the Republican candidate supported the personhood amendment. You know, the one that declares all fertilized eggs have the full rights of a human being.

That came up in the Iowa Senate debate, which I am slightly embarrassed to admit I watched from beginning to end.

David: Wow. You do have swing state envy. Are you listening to reports on corn prices too?

Gail: Iowa debates are always worthwhile. I enjoy the moment when the fiscal conservative calls for less federal spending, and then is forced to make it clear that underwriting the manufacture of corn-based ethanol does not count as wasteful.

David: My problem with the ethanol subsidies is purely selfish. You used to be able to drive around Iowa and see some crop diversity. Now it’s corn, corn, corn. I bet that even the field of dreams is covered with corn. It’s tedious.

Gail: There’s been a growing attempt on the part of Republicans to bring ISIS into the campaign. Most of the ads I’ve seen don’t have a coherent theme. It’s like, “When terrorists were beheading Americans in Syria, Senator X supported the Obama administration and also missed a public hearing of the Veterans Affairs Committee.”

David: I’m just glad to see any foreign policy in this election. We should have at least some form of national debate on ISIS. I guess this is also a Republican effort to nationalize the election. As observers like Sean Trende have noted, earlier in the campaign there was a disjunction between the fundamentals and the polls. The fundamentals — the president’s low approval ratings — suggest this should be a big Republican year. But the polls were much closer. Many Democratic candidates were hanging in there, even in states Romney carried. Over the past month the polls have moved slightly toward the fundamentals — that is in a slightly Republican direction.

Gail: People are so angry at Barack Obama. Their ire seems to be mainly about the economy, yet compared to many other countries, the United States is doing pretty well economically. I’m happy to accept the theory that people are angry because of income inequality and the struggling middle class. But the solution to that wouldn’t be electing a Congress that’s determined to cut federal spending. You’d just wind up with more laid-off state employees, highway construction workers, even schoolteachers.

Want to explain that to me?

David: It’s possible that people don’t think they’re getting their money’s worth. It could be they’re not crazy about boondoggles like ethanol or gubernatorial trips to Afghanistan. It’s possible that they think they could spend money more wisely than Congress does. Can’t imagine how they could leap to that conclusion.

Gail: Well, that’s Congress. But they’re trying to make it all about the president. I’m expecting that Georgia voters will soon be seeing ads in which Michelle Nunn’s picture morphs into Barack Obama.

David: What strikes me about this is that the movement is similar across many races, suggesting that there is a national dynamic in place. That makes sense. Over the past five midterms we’ve pretty much seen national dynamics in place most of the time. There was a wave for one party or another. This year that should favor Republicans, who are trying to build the election around national issues, not local candidates.

Gail: Do you think these elections matter? There’s a lot of sentiment that they don’t – that if the Republicans take over the Senate, there’ll be the same stalemate we’ve got now. That it might even make it easier for the Democrats in 2016, because there’ll still be gridlock and the Republicans will be more clearly to blame.

David: I’m simple-minded. I think winning is better than losing. Remember, once an incumbent gets in, he or she is likely to stay there for a long time. I don’t think Democrats should be pre-rationalizing this year’s results.

Gail: Me neither. Although it would be pretty interesting if the Republicans won control of the Senate, and we got to spend two years watching them complain about the evils of the filibuster.

David: I can’t imagine much legislation will be passed either way. After Obamacare, which was signed into law in March of 2010, I can’t think of a major piece of legislation that has passed in any of the last four years, and I suppose we’ll go another two in the same stagnation.

Gail: You must be forgetting the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship Act.

But about these elections – I admit that I am jealous of the big swing states. If I was in Iowa or Alaska or North Carolina, I’d be obsessed with the senate race. I’d talk about it all the time, and people would run away when they saw me coming.

David: You’ve got it bad.

Gail: Here in New York, everything’s pretty much preordained. Except in Staten Island, where the Republican congressman who threatened to throw a TV reporter over a Capitol balcony might be in trouble.

David: Is that because TV reporters are so light? Throwing a print reporter would be way more impressive.

Gail: Well, he failed to follow through. Maybe his constituents are irked that he was all show and no throw. But he’s also under multiple indictments for perjury and tax evasion. And yet his defeat is not a foregone conclusion.

David: I’d think a perjury record would be a plus. Practice makes perfect.

The Conversation

Toasting With a Half-Full Glass

By David Brooks and Gail Collins
The Conversation

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

David Brooks: Do you mind if I go the narcissistic route and ask you about my own column?

Gail Collins: Column? David, I had no idea you wrote a column. I thought you were just here for the conversation.

David: I wanted to ask you specifically about my contention that New York is in better shape than ever before. I’m in the city about two days a week these days and I’ve just been amazed by how great the parks are this year, from the Cloisters down to Battery Park.

Gail: I agree the parks are great, although I suspect you’re just rediscovering them. They’ve been terrific for ages. Except for the part where speed demon bicyclists run over pedestrians.

David: I am also amazed by how many great and original stores there are. Have you been to Story, a store on 10th Avenue that changes themes and merchandise around a new narrative every few months? I know we’re supposed to bemoan the fact that mom and pop stores have been replaced by CVS and the chains, but let’s not romanticize the old days of the mom and pops.

Gail: Sorry, as a person who now lives next door to a Rite Aid, and a stone’s throw from two Duane Reades, I am totally in mourning for the mom and pops. How does the economy support so many mega-pharmacies anyway? You’d think the entire population did nothing but fill prescriptions and buy hair spray.

David: My question: Do you think New York is better than ever? I’d say 1910s New York had better radicals. The 1920s had better writers and nightclubs. 1940s New York had better painters, but contemporary New York has better everything else.

Gail: You forgot rents. Every other era in the history of the city had more affordable rents.

Also, I remember many periods with better politics. People seem grumpily disengaged. Maybe it’s because this year’s big race involves choosing between Andrew Cuomo and A Person Named Rob.

David: The cities are wonderful. I was just in Philadelphia, and it was the same. The dead parts of town now have vibrant restaurants. In D.C., middle-class neighborhoods like Brookland are sprouting bars, coffee shops and other gathering spots. Even Detroit has restaurants like Slows Bar-B-Q, which are destination restaurants in the middle of urban wastelands.

Gail: This has been a long time coming. I remember when I was in college and everybody was worried about the death of the cities. I heard a speaker – it might actually have been Saul Alinsky – predict that the cities would be saved not by government action, but by people deciding it was more convenient and fun to live there. And it really is, especially if you’re young or old.

David: I don’t think this is just a gentrification phenomenon. It’s like there’s been a leap in the quality of American aesthetics. People have better taste and demand more. Meanwhile, McDonald’s is losing customers at the moment, especially among people in their 20s.

Gail: I love the idea that McDonald’s is slipping due to aesthetics. But I would feel more inclined to embrace your theory if I could see one fewer Duane Reade from my corner.

David: I’m trying to focus on the positive these days. Somebody gave me good advice recently. The world is divided between glass-half-full people and glass-half-empty people. It’s also divided between givers and takers. When you are choosing a spouse or a friend, you want a glass-half-full giver. You definitely do not want a half-empty-glass taker.

Gail: Can I send a shout-out to my spouse? He is definitely a giver. Also, the other night I heard him tell someone: “Marriage becomes truly happy when you stop trying to change your mate.” So I’d say go for a glass-half-full, giver, nonchanger.

David: Personally, I’d befriend any dichotomizer. You have probably heard me say that the world is divided between two types of people, those who divide the world into two types of people and those who don’t. I’m definitely the former. Every virtue has its vice. Every situation has its paradox.

Gail: I am tempted to divide everything into threes, but I have a feeling you’re taking us somewhere else.

David: Yes, that brings me to the pivot. A few years ago, the Obama administration decided to favor the positive over the negative. U.S. policy would pivot from places where bad news dominates (the Middle East) to places where good news dominates (Asia). To tell you the truth, I never understood the pivot. We have some diplomats who focus on the Middle East and some people who focus on Asia. Why can’t we pay attention to both regions at once? A country is not like a person; it doesn’t have to pivot, pirouette or fox trot. It can do a lot simultaneously.

Gail: I always thought it was just a way to say, “We’re going to try to avoid the Middle East but still provide enough work to keep the State Department off the streets.”

David: Regardless, the administration has completely failed to pull off the pivot. Obama keeps getting pulled into the Middle East. This is the paradox of power. The most powerful person on earth doesn’t get to choose what he’ll think about each day.

Gail: I know I’ve told you this before, but I’m convinced it’s the story of the modern presidency. Whoever sits in the Oval Office spends every morning going over reports about people who are planning to kill American civilians. And no matter what they say when they come into office, the terror of another 9-11 is going to wind up obsessing them and turn them into interventionists abroad.

I don’t necessarily believe it’s the right assessment, but I suspect the transformation is inevitable.

David: I guess I’d say when planning a career you should focus on your strengths, but when running a government, your job is to focus on places where things are going wrong. Political leaders have limited power to make the world noble. They have some power to prevent the world from becoming miserable. Their job is not to make things great. It is to prevent things from being terrible — so that people in the private world will have the context they need to make things great.

It’s like being a cop. You just have to congregate in bad situations. In politics the highs are not as high as the lows are low. The downside risk is always bigger than the upside risk.

Gail: Yeah, that’s true. You have to focus on the problem spots. But that still leaves the question of what you do. Stay out of it, strengthen homeland security, and try to encourage international sanctions against the bad guys? Or actually intervene militarily?

David: How do you think Obama is doing at preventing the Middle East from being completely miserable? I was surprised by how gigantic the U.S. bombing campaign against ISIS seems to be. Do you think it will work?

Gail: Work? As in reduce violence in the region and end the threat of terrorist attacks at home? No, sadly, I don’t think it’ll work.

David: I guess my view is that Obama will have to ramp up the operation quite a lot over the next couple of years. Not a big invasion, obviously, but something much more aggressively designed to dislodge ISIS from the cities. I suspect he’ll do this, and the beneficiary will be his successor, not him.

I think this a lot about Obama. I think the economy is finally going to take off as corporations unleash their cash over the next few years. I think the Middle East will evolve away from its jihadist phase to something more orderly if not exactly democratic. The next president will have it easy compared to B.H.O. Oh well, them’s the breaks.

Gail: I agree that we won’t remember this president for foreign policy. They gave the Nobel Peace Prize to the wrong guy. It’ll be the next administration, or the one after, who puts an end to the era George W. Bush started in Iraq. But the history books will celebrate Barack Obama as the president who grabbed the economy by the collar and saved the country from another Great Depression.

He will also be remembered as the president who finally, after 100 years of struggle, created a national health care system. Which is huge, just huge. And which gives me a chance to end on an optimistic note — to raise my half-full glass.

The Conversation

What’s Left of Positive Thinking?

By David Brooks and Gail Collins
The Conversation

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Byron Mallot, the former Democratic candidate for governor of Alaska, left, appeared with Bill Walker, the independent candidate. Mr. Mallot and Mr. Walker have combined on a unified ticket to face the Republican Gov. Sean Parnell. Mark Thiessen/Associated Press

Gail Collins: David, do you have a goal as a column writer? One of my major ones has always been to write about the events of the day without making readers want to throw themselves out a window.

David Brooks: My goal was to be mentioned in a tweet by John Legend. That happened after I wrote a column copping to smoking weed in high school. Since then my life has been flat, arid, scarcely worth living.

Gail: I was asking because my don’t-make-readers-suicidal goal has gotten harder to achieve lately. Geesh, I’ve never seen so much bad news. I’m hoping you’ll inspire me to be upbeat.

David: I know exactly how you feel. Things are so bad I’ve been turning to Swedish cinema from the 1950s to cheer myself up. As a general rule, people who work in or cover politics are depressed, people who work in business are optimistic, people who work in tech are insanely optimistic. Maybe you and I should write about innovations in dating apps.

I maintain equilibrium by considering this thought: From 1865 until 1900, city and federal governments were highly dysfunctional. Yet technical innovations were so impressive we still count those as years of progress. I’m hoping that we can survive a few decades of dysfunctional governance and still remain a superpower.

Gail: Well, that’s comforting – although being a superpower is something I often think we could live without. Can’t we just be a helpful member of a team?

But let’s stick to foreign affairs. Did you watch Senator Lindsey Graham hyperventilating about the Obama ISIS strategy over the weekend? Let’s see: “This is a turning point in the war on terror. Our strategy will fail yet again. This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed back here at home.”

David: Lindsey Graham is one of my favorite senators so I’m willing to cut him a lot of slack and in any case I think his demand that President Obama rise to the occasion of a turning point is exactly right. We need a president who can rise and turn simultaneously. Like an ice dancer.

Gail: You don’t scare the pants off the public to make your point. I think Lindsey Graham should be expelled from the talking-heads franchise.

However, he did make me realize that I’m more optimistic about the Obama strategy than I realized. I think it’s going to cost a stupendous amount of money. I worry about innocent civilians getting caught in the airstrikes. I have grave, grave doubts about those rebel Syrian fighters the administration wants to train. But compared to Lindsey I’m a veritable sunbeam.

David: I actually think this policy is extremely likely to succeed. After all, we don’t have to win this war. We just need to screw up less than ISIS. This is extremely likely. What is ISIS? One part Western lunatics who want to ride around in jeeps killing people. One part Sunni opportunists who are still looking for their post-Saddam employment opportunities. And one part religious nut, whose vision of the future involves moving to the 12th century. There is little chance these loons are going to be able to sustain a government without generating enormous opposition. If we just keep the pressure on, ISIS will crumble eventually. Though not, unfortunately, before changing their name six more times.

Gail: Good work on the positive thinking. Let me move on to a different dark cloud. Do you follow football?

David: I think we are at the point in our relationship when I have to admit I’m a Cowboys fan. It happened in 1972. I was young. I really can’t explain it. If you want to end our conversations now I will completely understand.

One the other hand, please tell me that despite growing up in Cincinnati, you are not a Bengals fan, a team whose impact on the cultural consciousness is limited to one guy named Boomer and one guy named Ochocinco, neither of whom is even a Bengal anymore.

Gail: I have seen this syndrome before. You liked the Cowboys because they were played so skillfully, even though they were in Texas and they were coached by the least adorable person in the history of professional sports. That’s serious sports watching. I, on the other hand, managed to spend several years in Milwaukee before I realized that Green Bay was in Wisconsin.

Yet although I have no interest in football whatsoever, I’ve been fixated on all the scandals that have been popping up.

Talk about depressing. Wife-beating, child-beating, assault – I had no idea how many professional football players get arrested every year.

David: Wait. Let me get this straight. You were surprised that in a league populated by young testosterone-dripping men who make their living through physical violence the players sometimes get arrested? Most of the players in the N.F.L. are quite smart and self-disciplined (you have to be able to master the playbooks), but this is a sport almost perfectly designed to attract a few bad apples.

Gail: Twenty-eight arrests since the last Super Bowl!

David: Just on the domestic violence front, I should point out this is a cause for optimism. The rates of domestic abuse have plummeted recently. I give credit to feminists who have highlighted the issue, to Joe Biden who made domestic violence a key cause of his, to evangelical churches, who have redefined masculinity and headship, plus a general decline in social tolerance for anger. If you want to feel upbeat, this is one reason.

Gail: You’re right, that’s a good point. Also, if you live in a city that’s always wanted but never attracted a football team, you can console yourself that it’s probably keeping the crime rate down.

David: Yes, imagine how violent L.A. would be if it still had the Crips, the Bloods and the Rams.

Gail: What do you think about Congress? Very few of the races this fall are really competitive. Too many of us are going to be forced to choose between The Guy Who Always Wins and some hapless alternative who appears to have been recruited on his way to visit his probation officer.

David: Depends on how you see it. Daniel Webster and Henry Clay were The Guy Who Always Wins. I’m not sure I’d put Michele Bachmann in their company, but in general I believe in experience.

Did you see that CNN is scaling back congressional coverage on the grounds that it is a ratings killer? The body is not exactly making itself relevant to the national conversation.

Gail: Yeah, it’s pretty pathetic. We’re going to war with ISIS and the Senate can’t get it together to confirm an ambassador to Turkey.

Maybe if they thought we were watching they’d do a little better. I’m still cranky about those inevitably re-elected legislators.

David: Hey! At least you’re represented. I live in Washington, D.C., where we have no real representation at all. Not that I’m complaining, given my neighbors’ voting patterns. Come to think of it, I’ve lived in New York, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois and Maryland, and I’m not sure any of those states deserve representation either.

One of the reasons I’m able to remain a conservative is that I don’t actually live among them. (I’m kidding).

Gail: One thing I feel cheerful about is that Hillary Clinton refrained from announcing her candidacy for president at that steak-fry in Iowa last weekend. We’ve already got presidential races that run for nearly two years.

David: I agree. We’ll have 10 years to talk about Hillary.

Gail: Right now I’d rather talk about Kansas, where the Democratic Senate candidate is trying to withdraw, and the independent candidate seems to be running ahead of the incumbent, whose state residence is a recliner in a friend’s country club hacienda.

I do love a big, complicated game-changer. Plus, there’s a recliner.

David: Interesting. My impression is that recliners tend to obviate mental complexity. Kierkegaard would have stretched to write “Goodnight Moon” if he’d had one.

Gail: Well, that’s not a bad analysis of the senator from Kansas.

David: I actually think we’re going to see a lot more races like the Kansas Senate race or the Alaska governor’s race.

Gail: In both, the Republicans thought they had a smooth ride, and then an independent popped up, joined hands with the Democrat, and – shazam! – you’ve got an exciting, competitive race.

David: When states are this polarized, the only way the minority party can win is by teaming with an independent candidate. I expect to see many more three-person races. I think this is a good thing. If more independents run, more incumbents will be worried about being challenged from the center.

Gail: I’ve always liked the idea of two parties, but maybe you’re right. At least it’s a cheerful thought. Not as cheerful as sitting in a recliner watching the 1972 Dallas Cowboys. But we make do with what we’ve got.

The Conversation

Our Reluctant National Security President

By David Brooks and Gail Collins
The Conversation

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

David Brooks: Gail, I’d like to start by asking you about embarrassing omissions. Are there books you haven’t read or places you haven’t been that you really should have in your cultural repertoire?

Gail Collins: Good grief, David. I’m not going to compare cultural repertoire defects with you. You’ve read half the books in the world.

David: Actually, my gaps are glaring. Pretty much everything by Dickens is a void for me — I just can’t get into the guy. And every epic poem ever written except “The Divine Comedy.” If I’m going to read a story, I need paragraphs.

Gail: O.K, that makes me feel better. There’s nobody I love better than Charles Dickens. “Bleak House” was my inspiration as a pundit. Also, since you don’t read epic poetry I am going to pretend that I do. Yes! “Orlando Furioso” is my favorite.

David: As for places, I have never been to Norway, which you just visited, but I don’t feel any moral obligation to see Scandinavia again. I should have visited Greece, Turkey and Japan, though.

Gail: David, are you suggesting that I attempted to raise questions about your geographic well-roundedness by telling you I’ve been to Norway? Honestly, you don’t have to go. It’s all right.

David: I raise this question for grand strategic reasons, naturally. Over the past few years the United States has been guilty of an embarrassing glaring omission. A succession of presidents has neglected to shore up the global state system.

Gail: Stop a second. When people bring up terms like “global state system,” I tend to blank out. Perhaps it’s like you with Dickens. But please, rephrase. Do you mean the United Nations and NATO or just a general working-together by countries of good will?

David: I’d put it this way. In the past, maintaining the global state system was almost instinctual for presidents. From Franklin Roosevelt through George H.W. Bush, we’ve had a series of leaders whose foreign policy visions were formed by the conflicts against fascism and communism. These leaders had a reflexive commitment to global institutions that contributed to global regularity and order. Leaders of this generation know how much effort it took to tend to these institutions.

But baby boomers — yes, this is another thing people can blame our generation for — did not grow up with that consciousness.

Gail: I should have known. Nothing bad exists that was not the fruit of the boomers. Do you remember all those years when we ruled? First the older generation worried about why we were so ticked off and asked themselves how they failed us. Then every company in the world asked what it would take to make us buy their stuff. I should have known there’d be payback.

Now we’re just the dumping ground for every problem from rising health costs to declining productivity.

And we’ve also screwed up the global state system? I warn you David, it’s just a matter of minutes before somebody starts talking about building ice floes to put us on. Despite global warming, which is undoubtedly our fault too.

David: Well yes, you make a good point, but let me continue on this theme. The decline in the management of this global system came from the right: George W. Bush’s weak coalition building skills —and from the left: President Obama’s tendency to withdraw to attend to nation-building at home.

Gail: That’s a nice way of putting it. By “attend to nation-building at home,” I presume you mean “wrestling with the crazed domestic right wing.”

I’m not sure I’m going to agree with your theory, but finish it before I say something unsupportive.

David: America’s leadership problems have been compounded by the fact that Europe has not been able to coordinate an effective military or foreign policy apparatus. And a new superpower, China, has failed to accept any responsibility for maintaining the system by which it rose.

The result is like when the normal teacher is off sick and the substitute teacher takes over. Do you remember those days? Every student started off a little more rambunctious. The class clowns and bullies picked and probed to see what they could get away with.

Gail: You’re looking at a decline of presidential leadership since World War II. I see a western world that has learned painfully, over and over again, how impossible it is to fight a ground war in other people’s countries. Particularly on a planet where your friends aren’t the only ones with weapons of mass destruction.

So maybe it’s not the presidents who have changed, but the world they confront.

David: In the Middle East the decline of the state system has created a vacuum that religious armies have filled. Conflict in the region is no longer defined by the Arab-Israeli dispute. That’s now a sideshow to the Arab vs. Arab war that is taking place on about four levels at once. It’s amazing. Since 1648 religion has been largely neutralized as a force in foreign affairs, but now ISIS wants to replace state system rules with religious war rules. Arab identities will be defined by the Sunni/Shiite rivalry and by fealty to jihadism.

Gail: You’re right, it is amazing, although I don’t think it’s unique to the Arabs. Having spent a little part of my younger days in Northern Ireland, I do kind of understand people’s capacity to use religion as an all-purpose cover for fights that are really about historic grievances.

David: All of this brings us home to President Obama.

Gail: I knew you were going to bring us back to President Obama.

David: It’s funny, but I don’t think his problem is conceptual. Occasionally he will say something unfortunate, like the time he told donors that the world is always messy. That is a completely inadequate diagnosis of the degradation of the global state system.

Gail: I agree it was unfortunate, but I heard it a different way. That it’s harder for the developed world to just go in there and bang heads because people who are all connected through the Internet can no longer close their eyes and shrug about the collateral damage. It made him sound as if he regretted those good old days, although I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way.

I do wonder if we would have bombed Japan if we knew everybody in Hiroshima had a smart phone.

David: In general, President Obama’s descriptions of the threats to the global order are robust and accurate. Yet there is a yawning chasm between his comments and his policies. He says ISIS is a cancer that can’t be tolerated anywhere. Yet his policies, at least so far, don’t lead to the destruction of ISIS, especially inside Syria. He understands that Vladimir Putin threatens the norm that big nations don’t gobble up little ones, and yet he is against giving Ukrainians the weapons they need to deter attack.

Gail: Without getting into Ukraine I do want to question the idea that the answer to all the problems of the world is to give the other side a whole bunch of weapons. How did ISIS get to be such a huge threat? In part because it was able to capture weaponry that we gave to Iraq.

David: What do you think the president should say tonight and do afterward?

Gail: Well, I am pretty sure that you’ll get your wish about the global state system. He’ll talk about his plans in the context of an international alliance of some sort.

David: I suspect tonight’s address will be the defining talk of his last two years. He’s learned that, especially in foreign affairs, presidents don’t get to choose their policies. A guy who came amid promises of withdrawal, amid talk of a pivot to Asia, vowing to do nation building at home, and arguing that military force is usually not the answer, is now going to be pivoting to the Middle East and using military force.

We are playthings of fate.

Gail: Here’s the thing we’re going to see with every post-9/11 president: They come in with principled theories about what they’re going to do, and then they read the intelligence and listen to their advisers spin the most horrific projections possible about what could happen. What terrorists are trying to do. And they imagine the awful things that could happen under their watch.

Barack Obama isn’t going to be the only expert in constitutional law who comes into office and tolerates unconstitutional wiretaps. I think history will judge he was wrong on that point. But there’s an excellent chance that history will also find that rather being slow on the war with ISIS, he was generally very smart in erring on the side of caution.

David: I suspect President Obama will be forced by circumstances to go against his inclinations and goals. He simply cannot leave office with ISIS in good shape. He wasn’t elected to democratize Iraq. He was elected amid promises that he would destroy Al Qaeda and its offshoots.

Gail: He was elected as the guy who promised not to get us involved in any more stupid wars. And that’s still an excellent goal.

David: One hard part, I’d say, is that Obama is governing at a time of low legitimacy, when people don’t really believe America can be an effective player in the world. I suspect Obama shares this belief to some extent. And he’s got to persuade current voters, in a way the WWII generation never needed to be persuaded, that the democratic community can be effective at defeating tyranny.

To do this he somehow has to set more realistic goals. Obviously George W. Bush’s goals of spreading freedom and defeating evil were too lofty, but that doesn’t mean we need to flip over and fatalistically assume we can do nothing. President Obama’s assaults on ISIS have so far borne enormous fruit. Sometimes force works. Sometimes war is the answer.

Gail: So I think you’re saying that Obama’s doing pretty darned well.

Let’s go back to where we started. Which was you mourning the loss of the global state system. Well, first you dissed Charles Dickens and Norway. But then it was the global state system.

And I still hate that phrase. Can’t we just say something like “working effectively with our allies?” And if so, do you really think a President Romney or McCain could have done it better?

David: The hard part is explaining to the American people what the system is. You can barely see it or feel it. But it is the unconscious background for everybody’s behavior, the good guys as well as the bad guys.

Gail: True, but I think it’s in better shape now than it would have been with a different president.

And I hope it’s a really good speech. I want Obama to take on all the jerks who are yelling about how we need to go in there and squash the enemy like a bug, or fight like men, or just blow the bad guys to smithereens.

We’ve long discovered he’s not the magic wordsmith we thought he was during his first run for office. But I hope he explains his plans tonight in a way that makes people feel like we can be strong and sensible at the same time.

David: None of the individual problems we face is going to threaten American interests. It wouldn’t be worth expending significant resources, even on the horrific Syrian civil war, if that was all that was at stake. But those kinds of conflicts are undermining the whole system of shared assumptions that kept everybody in line.

The Conversation

Midterms on the Menu

By David Brooks and Gail Collins
The Conversation

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

A kale salad. Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Gail Collins: Hey David, here we are again. I would personally like to thank the voters in Arkansas, Alaska, North Carolina, Iowa and Louisiana for throwing the fate of the Senate into turmoil and giving us a hot new election season to talk about.

David Brooks: Hello, Gail! It’s such a pleasure to be conversing again. As you know, I just got too busy over the past few months to converse, because I was following the Milli Vanilli reunion tour. Lots of embarrassing pictures of me, Kate Upton and a bubble machine from the Cleveland concert. Fortunately they’re safely locked away in iCloud!

Gail: You’re so of the moment. I thought for the next several weeks we’d just focus on the elections that are happening this November. Way too early to be talking about the next presidential contest. Do you agree? Or do you have some hot gossip you want to share?

David: Personally, I’ve spent the summer monitoring vegetarian appetizers. It seemed like a year ago you couldn’t sit down at a restaurant without confronting six kale salads. Then about six months ago, beets were on every menu. Now I feel that there’s nothing but brussels sprouts and cauliflower. I wonder if arugula has been out of fashion long enough to come back in? I like arugula.

Gail: Is this an elaborate presidential metaphor in which President Obama is arugula, Chris Christie represents kale and Rand Paul is the cauliflower? If so, I’m not entirely clear on who the beet guy is.

David: I realize that these are First World Problems. But so far I haven’t applied any political metaphors to my dining sociology. I confess I sometimes do think it’s too early to be talking about the next presidential contest, but I don’t think it’s too early to be talking about whether it is too early to be talking about it. You’ve got to have the meta-conversation as an exploratory phase of getting to the real thing.

Gail: I can’t resist asking just once — is Jeb Bush still your favorite candidate?

David: Ah yes, it has been ages since you have asked me about Jeb Bush — or, for that matter, the pain in my hip when I go running. But I thank you for asking. I do think Jeb Bush would potentially be a very good president. He has maturity, balance, good values and he’s taken some brave stances on immigration and other matters. I’ve heard mixed predictions from people who claim to know what they are talking about on whether he actually will run. My own guess, based on zero inside information, is that in the end he won’t. The people who run for president have been thinking of it since they were 5 and will walk through walls to do so. The other politicians think it would be nice if the country magically made them president, but they aren’t willing to eat gravel for two years in order to have a shot. I have always put Jeb Bush in this second category, and so far that instinct has proved correct.

What about you? Do you have a view of him, or a prediction about whether he’ll run?

Gail: It would be totally superficial of me to say I don’t want him in the race just because he’s extremely boring. But if Bush is the nominee you’ll have to converse about him on your own. I’ll be under the bed in a fetal position.

David: Sometimes we have to choose between love of country and love of wacky material for our columns.

Gail: How about Rand Paul? It would be kind of fascinating to have a presidential race in which one of the major nominees was an isolationist. I know Paul would say he’s not really exactly an isolationist, but he’s as close as we’re ever likely to get at that level. I’d like to hear those debates. But not if it means we actually wind up with President Rand Paul.

David: I still think there’s a 20 percent chance the party goes with Paul or Ted Cruz.

Gail: Oh, be still my beating heart!

David: Assuming Bush does not run, all the candidates have at least one serious political flaw. Given the lack of an obvious safe choice and the sour mood, there’s some chance the primary voters could just pull the rip cord and figure, “What the hell, let’s go with something new!” Then I’d be the one who would be in a fetal position, my column just the sound of whimpering.

Actually, I’m wondering if this will turn out to be a foreign policy election. We have not had one for a long while, maybe 1980 or 1968. If the Middle East continues its descent into chaos (more or less a given) and Putin continues to gobble his neighbors and intimidate the world (ditto), then we could be heading for an election about America’s role in the world. That would scramble every category we operate by.

Gail: One last question before we get to those big Senate races. How do you feel about Hillary Clinton? That book tour was a bit of a wake-up call for the fans who’ve been envisioning her as the perfect candidate.

David: I should admit that the decision whether or not to read “Hard Choices” was for me not a hard choice. Nonetheless, I’m feeling very pro-Hillary these days, especially after her much talked about interview with Jeff Goldberg in The Atlantic (I think every single NYT column, from Sports to Vows, took a shot at it). I thought that in that interview she sounded like a latter day Harry Truman, which is a compliment. If Hillary ran against Rand Paul, I’d have the easiest voting decision of my adult life.

Gail: There are a lot of things I admire about Hillary Clinton but her hawkish tilt isn’t on the top of the list. And her book was one of the hardest-to-read political tomes ever. I took it with me on a vacation in Norway, which involved a lot of floating around fjords, not to mention long flights. I was sure I’d get “Hard Choices” done before the trek home. Instead I passed the 250 level on Candy Crush.

David: Are you one of those people who only vacations in countries with large sovereign wealth funds? I have never been to Norway, but I’m not sure why you would choose it as a vacation destination over Finland or Latvia, except maybe the whaling options. Plus, I really don’t think people in our business should be reading political books on vacation. We should be reading depressing Norwegian novelists for moral improvement.

Gail: I’ll save those for the campaign trail.

O.K., one, final, absolute last question before the Senate races. How have you been feeling about the president? I’ve been impatient, but I draw a total blank on what I would have liked him to do that he didn’t do. A magical race relations speech would have been nice. But I do not believe that we’d be in a better spot now if he’d been arming more rebels in Syria.

David: I give him a B for the summer. On foreign affairs, he has begun to be more forward leaning than before. Thankfully he is abandoning the West Point speech that was supposed to be his defining foreign policy document. The point of that speech was that the military approach is not always the best response to every problem. That’s true of course, but sometimes the military approach is a necessary piece when you are facing a military problem, like the advance of the ISIS army or Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine. The paradox for Obama is that his administration is going to get much more militarized during its final years. The guy who spent six years pulling out of commitments will now spend the next two making them again.

Gail: You’re probably right. He was also the guy who ran on the theory that he could eliminate the red-blue divide. The poor man is a walking cascade of irony.

But about this year’s Senate races. Six or eight of them determine whether the Democrats or Republicans control the Senate. Do you have a favorite contest?

David: North Carolina. In the first place, the Democrat, Kay Hagan, and the Republican, Thom Tillis, are locked in a dead heat. Both have higher negative ratings than positive ratings. There’s also a gigantic gender gap. Hagan has an 18-point lead among women and Tillis has a 12-point lead among men. Hagan loves Obama on even-numbered days and slams him on odd-numbered days. This race will be the bellwether for the whole nation. You can tell I am a professional pundit because I use the word bellwether while having no clue what a literal bellwether is. (O.K., I just Googled it. It’s the lead sheep in a flock, who wears a bell.)

Gail: I’ve got a soft spot for Alaska. The Republican nominee has been under assault for not really being from Alaska. Which doesn’t seem fair to me, since almost nobody is actually from Alaska except the Inuit. However, unfortunately for him, on the glorious day after he won the primary, an Ohio paper ran a headline saying: “Cleveland-area native Dan Sullivan wins Alaska G.O.P. primary.” I believe it was a low blow.

David: Alaska is a good one. I notice the Democrats are attacking your Ohio man, Sullivan, for favoring miners over fishermen. I think we should all favor fishermen in such a dispute but I’m not sure.

Gail: Well, you know which side is going to be worried about clean water.

By the way, I believe we have a date to cover West Virginia together. As you know I’ve always wanted to spend some time there. And the Democratic nominee was once the mascot of the West Virginia University football team. They’re the Mountaineers and people in the crowd threw cups at her because they’d never had a female Mountaineer before. So she has my strong sympathy.

David: The West Virginia race is one where even the Republican is being accused of not being pro-miner enough. Apparently when you have a state without lots of commercial fishermen, the coal miners get totally lavish in their demands. It’s tough to see the Democrat standing a chance there.

And yes, I foresee an excellent road trip to West Virginia, which will include frequent trips to various Waffle Houses. I do not believe Waffle House as yet has an appetizer featuring either kale or some delicate beet concoction. Though who’s to tell, there have been many signs recently that Armageddon is upon us.