Wednesday, January 16, 2008

David Brooks and Michigan   [Rich Lowry]

David Brooks is distressed by the results in Michigan. I think this is a case—and it happens to all of us—of a writer getting caught up in his own theory. According to Brooks after Iowa, Mike Huckabee realized the changing nature of evangelicalism, understood the crisis of authority in this country, and grasped the cultural roots of middle class anxiety. Well, we now know from Iowa, New Hampshire, and Michigan, that what Huckabee can really do is win evangelical votes and that's about it—he is the most limited "identity politics" candidate in either  presidential field. But he represented the future, according to Brooks, partly because of his deep understanding of middle class anxiety. And then came Michigan, an economically distressed state where voters care deeply about the economy, and Mitt Romney won it handily. It turns out that anxious middle class voters don't cotton to a candidate whose economic policy consists almost entirely of attacking the other guy for looking like a businessman or a candidate who wants to throw enormous new regulatory burdens on the state's industry, while desperately promising that new "green" jobs will miraculously appear to alleviate the pain. They instead went with the candidate who has credibility on business issues, who offered an optimistic (yes, perhaps unduly so) vision of the economic future, and sold a generally free-market agenda in a way that appealed to anxieties and hopes of Michiganders. For this, Mitt Romney is yesterday's man?

01/16 04:44 PMShare