Pundit Boxscore for Monday 18 August 2003

DAVID BROOKS 2003: I'm looking forward to adding the first new columnist to the Lying in Ponds roster in quite a while, especially after losing three already this year (Frank Rich, Michael Kelly and Bill Keller), in addition to the continuing absence of Mary McGrory due to illness. While waiting for Mr. Brooks to start his column at The New York Times, I've been looking at his columns this year in The Weekly Standard. I've evaluated 19 columns, two of which are listed under "David Brooks, for the Editors". Another column is accessible only by subscribers, so I skipped that one.

When you look at the resulting page of statistics for David Brooks' columns, his partisanship score is 46, which would place him ninth on our list, just ahead of Mary McGrory. Mr. Brooks' relatively high score is mostly due to extravagant praise of George W. Bush -- in fact his columns most resemble Peggy Noonan's this year. He has made over 80 positive references but only a few negative references to the president. Although much of the praise is in the context of Mr. Brooks' strong support for the war in Iraq, his columns on other subjects -- Bill Frist, Michael Kelly, Arnold Beichman, welfare reform, and economics -- have also stayed safely within party lines. In the Donald Luskin National Review Online article, Mr. Brooks responded to the preceeding analysis: "It's a question of my temperament, and my temperament is not particularly partisan." These six months of The Weekly Standard columns certainly do not prove that Mr. Brooks is partisan, but compared to his soon-to-be colleagues at The New York Times, he appears to tilt far more to the Republican side than William Safire. The addition of Mr. Brooks should broaden the ideological range of the Times pundits; we'll see if his commentary will continue to be as one-sided as it has been at The Weekly Standard so far this year.

There was a very interesting interview with David Brooks in a Chicago Tribune article by Julia Keller last week. Here Mr. Brooks describes his ideological approach:

Q. You're classified as a conservative. Is that fair, or do you bristle at labels?

A. I think it's fair in the general sense. I consider myself a Teddy Roosevelt conservative. I'm not a free market libertarian. I like an aggressive foreign policy. On domestic policy, I'm a neoconservative. I like welfare reform. I like vouchers and charter schools. I do support gay marriage, which I think comes from knowing a lot of gay people.

Q. Some people have said you're the "good" face of conservatism. What they mean, I think, is that you seem like a nice guy. Is this so?

A. [Laughs] A lot of my closest friends are liberals. I think you need both liberals and conservatives. If you had just one side in charge, they'd run the country off a cliff.