Dissecting the Political Brain of David Brooks

If I hadn't known what to expect from the title ("Stop Making Sense"), I could guess from the well crafted first sentence, with all the resonance of the opening lines of a Dickens novel: "Between 2000 and 2006, a specter haunted the community of fundamentalist Democrats. Members of this community looked around and observed their moral and intellectual superiority."

By this point I could guess that "the worst of times" in this tale about my recently published book was not going to be preceded by "the best of times." In fact, the times only got worse: "Serious thinkers set to work, and produced a long shelf of books answering this question. Their answers tended to rely on similar themes. First, Democrats lose because they are too intelligent. Their arguments are too complicated for American voters. Second, Democrats lose because they are too tolerant. They refuse to cater to racism and hatred. Finally, Democrats lose because they are not good at the dark art of politics. Republicans, though they are knuckle-dragging simpletons when it comes to policy, are devilishly clever when it comes to electioneering."

So began conservative commentator David Brooks' review of my book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. It was well suited, I thought, for the National Review and other humor magazines, but alas, it was in a different venue, the New York Times Book Review, which, under the direction of a right-wing book editor, is increasingly publishing reviews from conservative commentators of books written from the left, essentially jamming the radar of readers who can no long tell from reviews in the prestigious newspaper whether a book is not worth reading or a reviewer is not worth reading.

As Brooks tells it, my central thesis is that the way to win elections is through "crude emotional outbursts," which makes him wonder aloud how I might explain why Howard Dean didn't win the 2004 Democratic primary election against the more emotionally subdued John Kerry. Of course, he wouldn't have had to wonder if he'd gone to the index and found the cleverly-concealed entry under "Dean, Howard." (Perhaps he was confused when he didn't see it under the Hs.)

After caricaturing my argument (which actually has very little to do with the emotions politicians display, except to the extent that their facial displays affect the emotions they elicit), he offers a rhetorical question to make his own counter-argument: "[I]s it possible that substance has something to do with the political fortunes of parties? Could it be that Democrats won in the middle part of the 20th century because they were right about the big issues -- the New Deal and the civil rights movement? Is it possible Republicans won in the latter part of the century because they were right about economic growth and the cold war? Is it possible Democrats are winning now because they were right about whether to go to war in Iraq?

Brooks' simple counter-argument seems "fair and balanced" -- giving the left its due, giving the right its due, so now we can all play squash together. It seems that way, of course, until you think about it for a moment. His answer to a 400-plus-page empirical argument against precisely his thesis (the data for which he never mentions or refutes) is that Democrats won in the 1960s because they were right about civil rights (although that's that's not my recollection -- as I recall, their stance on civil rights cost them a few hundred electoral votes since the 1960s, with some help from a number of well-crafted Republican phrases such as "able bodied welfare loafers" and images of dashing young men like "Willie" Horton); that Democrats lost after an unrivaled period of prosperity and growth in the 2000 election because... (I'm not sure how to finish that sentence); and that they won in 2006 because suddenly the Iraq War took a turn for the worse after being such a smashing success in 2004. And just to set the record straight, under threat of being accused of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy," Democrats actually voted for the Iraq War Resolution in 2002, not against it.

But I thought it might be interesting to test my alternative theory -- that the words, imagery, and neural networks we activate in people's minds influence what they believe and feel and ultimately how they vote -- by examining Brooks' review itself. If clever rhetorical devices, particularly those that cross the line into deception, are irrelevant to people's judgments of the substance of an argument, we wouldn't expect to see them in a review designed to illuminate the substance of a book. So let's take a close look at Brooks lays out his argument and the kind of language he uses.

Consider the following passage:

Westen begins by noting that recent research has shot holes through the theory of the dispassionate rational mind that emerged from the 18th-century Enlightenment. People rely upon emotion to drive the decision-making process and reach conclusions that make them feel good.

Reason and rationality, therefore, play a limited role in political decisions. "The dispassionate mind of the 18th-century philosophers," Westen says, "allows us to predict somewhere between 0.5 and 3 percent of the most important political decisions people will make over the course of their lives."

"Westen says" here is an interesting word choice. It implies mere opinion, as if I were picking numbers out of the air. What Brooks doesn't mention is that I was summarizing the data from a series of scientific studies that actually allowed us to quantify the extent to which "objective facts" -- or "substance," as he would put it -- had influenced public opinion in some of the most politically important moments of our lifetimes, such as the impeachment of Bill Clinton and judgments about whether Al Gore or George Bush had won the 2000 election. In both of these cases, the vast majority of partisans -- both the everyday citizens we studied and members of Congress and the Supreme Court -- managed to reason to conclusions that exquisitely matched what they wanted to believe.

Brooks continues his account:

[Westen] then goes on to assert that Democrats have been losing because they have been appealing to the rational part of the mind. They issue laundry lists of policies and offer arguments with evidence. They don't realize how the images they are presenting set off emotional cues that undermine their own campaigns.

For example, the right side of John Edwards's mouth tends to curl up. "Humans innately dislike facial asymmetries," Westen observes, "and this should have caught the eye of his advisers." In Connecticut, Ned Lamont ran a commercial showing Joe Lieberman morphing into George Bush, but in the ad Lieberman was smiling. "Smiling faces innately activate parts of the brain (and facial mimicry on the part of the observer) that reinforce happiness, not distaste."

Well, that sounds pretty trivial, doesn't it? Curling asymmetries, smiling faces? And it probably would be trivial if it weren't part of a broader argument that included dozens of other examples of the complex ways our minds and brains are governed by networks of associations--thoughts, feelings, memories, and images that are woven together through experience -- and how evoking one network or another can change the way voters think and feel about an issue. For example, Brooks doesn't mention my dissection of the orchestrated campaign now-Senator Bob Corker and the Republic National Committee ran against black Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. in the Tennessee Senate race in 2006. In that campaign, an ad showing a scantily clad (or unclad -- you couldn't tell because of the way the image was -- accidentally? -- cropped) blonde sex kitten crowed, "I met Harold at the Playboy party!" All the while, Corker was on the stump, asking which of the two men was the "real Tennessean." The answer, by the way, was that they were both "real Tennesseans," one from Memphis and the other from Chattanooga. The goal, of course, was to get white voters to think about which of them was really "one of us." And funny how that ad just happened to activate latent networks about predatory, hypersexual black men who want our white women.

But Brooks himself offers a striking example of the activation of networks for the purpose of creating a false impression:

Westen urges Democratic candidates to go for the gut, and includes a number of speeches that he wishes Democratic candidates had given. He wishes, for example, Al Gore had hit George Bush harder for being a drunk. He wishes Gore had interrupted a presidential debate and barked at Bush, "If someone is going to restore dignity to the Oval Office, it isn't a man who drank his way through three decades of his life and got investigated by his father's own Securities and Exchange Commission for swindling people out of their retirement savings."

At another point, he imagines Gore exploding: "Why don't you tell us how many times you got behind the wheel of a car with a few drinks under your belt, endangering your neighbors' kids? Where I come from, we call that a drunk." If Democrats would go for people's primitive passions in this way, Westen argues, they'd win elections.

What Brooks knows as a writer is that the way you contextualize a passage has everything to do with the impression readers take away from it. Reading these quotes -- as woven together with colorful phrases such as "He wishes Gore had interrupted a presidential debate and barked at Bush [emphasis added], "he imagines Gore exploding [emphasis added], and later, "the sort of crude emotional outbursts Westen recommends" [emphasis added] -- the reader would have the distinct impression that I thought Gore should have repeatedly and viciously attacked Bush for his history of alcoholism. I happen to know that he was successful in leaving this impression in readers who hadn't read the book, because several of them emailed me to tell me why they thought attacking a recovered alcoholic would have been a terrible idea -- something no one who has read what I wrote in context -- including Bill Clinton, who found the same passages Brooks uses as negative examples particularly compelling -- came away thinking I was advocating.

So let's take a look at what I actually said. Here is the first passage, where I would, according to Brooks, have had Gore "interrupt a presidential debate" to "bark," seemingly unprovoked, about Bush's alcoholism:

In 2000, Gore faced what he and his advisors perceived to be a dilemma. The country had just gone through a year of scandals leading up to the impeachment trial of an otherwise very popular president...The question Gore and his advisors asked and answered to their own satisfaction reflected the kind of one-dimensional thinking we have seen repeatedly in Democratic campaigns. Is Clinton an asset or a liability to the Gore campaign? Is he a positive or a negative?

...The problem, though, was not the answer at which Gore and his advisors arrived but the question itself. Had they understood emotional associations, they would have asked a very different question: given that Clinton and Gore are inextricably linked in people's minds, how do we activate the positive associations people have formed to Bill Clinton over eight years and reinforce those links to Gore, and how do we inhibit the associations between Clinton's personal scandals and Gore's personal attributes?

Had they asked this question, they wouldn't have conceded all claims to the accomplishments of the Clinton-Gore years (and thus enjoyed none of the positive associations) while simultaneously tying their hands against all attacks for fear of invoking Clinton's name (accruing every negative association George W. Bush and Karl Rove threw at them).

Asked this way -- as a question about how to manage voters' ambivalence toward Bill Clinton the president and Bill Clinton the womanizer -- the answer is obvious. And the answer would have set Gore free at the start of the election or the first time Bush telegraphed that he intended to make the election a referendum on "character." The character charge made heavy use of guilt by association, essentially saying, "We need to restore integrity to the Oval Office" -- the room associated in people's minds with the Lewinsky scandal. Although Bush mentioned fund-raising "scandals" (such as the use of White House phone lines for campaign phone calls), those were just the conscious overlay, which had little emotional power on their own. The real message was that Clinton's sexual escapades had tarnished the dignity of the presidency, and what Bush-Rove hoped to do was to cast a wide associative net with "character" and "integrity" that would blur the lines between Clinton's personal indiscretion and Gore's integrity.

Unfortunately, blinded by his anger and feelings of betrayal, and surrounded by advisers either deaf to the rising character crescendo or unable to imagine a way to bring the concerto to a close, Gore let the charge fester. To answer it, he would have had to utter Clinton's name. He and his advisers seemed to think that if they just didn't talk about Clinton, the association would go away.

But as has been the case every time Democrats have turned to avoidance as a campaign strategy, the strategy backfired, for two very important reasons. First, whether Gore liked it or not, he was inextricably linked associatively to Clinton. He was Clinton's vice president for eight years, and their names appeared in two election cycles on bumper stickers as "Clinton-Gore." You can't get much more associated than that. Second, the other side was talking about Clinton, referring constantly to Clinton-Gore, and doing everything they could to create a network around "character" and "integrity" that made Clinton and Gore partners in crime.

Gore simply ceded the networks, allowing Bush to tell whatever stories he wanted about Clinton-Gore's integrity because Gore didn't want to mention that he had been Clinton's vice president. The irony is that although Clinton's poll numbers were low for personal integrity, his numbers were high for overall job performance -- remarkably high for a president who had spent eight years dealing with well-financed right-wing efforts to destroy him, supplemented by the Starr inquisition, financed handsomely by fifty million in American tax dollars.

So imagine if Gore had responded the first time Bush first uttered any words vaguely insinuating character issues with something like this:

George Bush wants to make character an issue in this election. Governor, I wouldn't go there if I were you because it's not exactly your strong suit.

But let me say something about Bill Clinton, so the American people know exactly where I stand.

No one in America, not you, not me, not Bill Clinton, is proud of what happened between him and Monica Lewinsky. A day doesn't go by that he doesn't think about the pain he caused his family, knowing that every time Chelsea turned on the television set for a year all she heard about was her father's affair. We are all well aware of the pain he and an out-of-control Republican Congress, determined to destroy the president no matter who they had to take down with him or how much filth they had to expose our children tfo on the evening news, caused this nation.

Am I proud of what Bill Clinton did with his personal life? Of course not. But I'll tell you what I am proud of.

I'm proud of what Bill Clinton and I have accomplished together over the last eight years. We began with an economy in disarray, left that way by Mr. Bush's father. We were deep into a recession that was costing Americans their jobs, with a federal government out of control, spending your grandchildren's money by the bushel, running up enormous deficits.

Now look where we are today. We've created millions of jobs, we've cut unemployment to historic lows, we've put a hundred thousand new police on our streets protecting our children, we've cut the number of people on welfare by more than half, and on top of that, we balanced the budget for the first time in thirty years. We've cut the numbers of abortions for the first time in twenty-five years, and we've given every woman in the United States the right to stay home for three months with her new baby without fear of losing her job. We've taken guns out of the hands of criminals while protecting the rights of hunters, and we've dramatically cut the crime rate.

If that isn't a record to be proud of, I don't know what is.

So Mr. Bush, let me give you a little word of advice. If I were you, I don't think I'd make integrity and values your campaign theme. If someone is going to restore dignity to the Oval Office, it isn't a man who drank his way through three decades of his life and got investigated by his father's own Securities and Exchange Commission for swindling people out of their retirement savings. If you want to be president, you're going to need to convince the American people that they should abandon everything Bill Clinton and I did that has made Americans safe, secure, and prosperous again, and instead vote for a man whose biggest concern seems to be that the yacht tax is too high.

Had Gore begun his campaign that way, he would have made clear that what united him and Clinton was not Clinton's handling of Monica Lewinsky but their administration's handling of the country. As importantly, he would have warned Bush and Rove that if they took off the gloves about character, so would Gore. The way you respond to your opponent's first attacks sends a crucial signal not just to the public but to the other campaign. A weak response does nothing but embolden the opposition. And a swift response to the character issue that included a brief reference to Bush's own moral failings would have prevented Bush, and ultimately the media, from framing the campaign as a contest between a man with questionable integrity and a man with questionable experience and intellect. Americans don't care much about experience and intellect, but they do care about integrity.

Unless Brooks is reading subliminal messages in my words that I can't see, I don't hear anything about interrupting a debate or barking. Nor do I hear anything about carping repeatedly on Bush's drinking. The comment about Bush's drinking is contextualized in a much broader story that has very little to do with his history of alcoholism.

It is difficult to see in Brooks' depiction of what I wrote anything other than the kind of deliberate deception we have seen repeatedly from the current administration, and precisely the kind of emotionally charged use of language (e.g., "interrupt," "bark") that, Brooks argues, has no sway on people's minds. If such language has no utility, it's odd that he chose to use it -- and to use it in precisely the deceptive ways I describe in the book as having no place in American political discourse.

I will not walk readers through the other example in which Brooks has me advising Gore to "explode" at Bush about his drunkenness, but will instead refer readers to the relevant passages (pp.125-131). I leave it to readers to judge whether they hear barking and carping about drunkenness as a central theme -- central enough that Brooks returns to it later in the review:

This thesis raises some interesting questions. First, why did someone with so little faith in rational inquiry go into academia, and what does he do to those who disagree with him at Emory faculty meetings, especially recovering alcoholics?

This is a beautifully constructed ad hominem attack (he comes back one more time to the Emory Psychology Department before the piece is over), because it uses humor to cover its ad hominem nature. Interestingly, this is just the kind of negative appeal I describe in the book that Brooks believes is inert. Yet clearly here the aim is to lead the reader, once again, to believe that my central argument is that Democrats should use crude, below-the-belt, unprovoked attacks to win elections, and that I lack both the scientific and the moral authority to be taken seriously. In this passage, he subtly suggests that I would advocate attacking people who are vulnerable (because now the alcoholics are recovering, not, like Bush, recovered -- activating a network suggesting a heartless person who would pick on someone trying to set himself on the right path -- not really the right analogy for Bush in either 2000 or 2004, who relentlessly attacked the character of both of his opponents) and would have no qualms about destroying anyone in my way in an academic argument.

Brooks' rhetorical question about why someone with so little faith in rational inquiry would go into academia is similarly designed to persuade readers that they know all they need to know about this book and have heard all they need to hear from this author, who is clearly some kind of crude Neanderthal who somehow missed not only the Enlightenment but the dawn of Homo sapiens. (Why he is asking a rhetorical question when the substance, not the rhetoric, is what matters is unclear.) Readers wouldn't know, from this description, that the book opens with a description of my research team's study of how the brain actually operates when partisans are presented with emotionally threatening information about their candidate, or that its pages are filled with descriptions of scientific studies -- among them, studies showing that the most important influences on voting behavior are emotional, studies Brooks neither mentions nor attempts to refute.

Let's take one final example:

The core problem with Westen's book is that he doesn't really make use of what we know about emotion. He builds on the work of Antonio Damasio, without applying Damasio's conception of how emotion emerges from and contributes to reason.

In this more sophisticated view, emotions are produced by learning. As we go through life, we learn what cause leads to what effect. When, later on, we face similar situations, the emotions highlight possible outcomes, drawing us toward some actions and steering us away from others.

I have to admit that I wasn't sure what to make of this criticism. As someone who has contributed to the scientific literature on emotion and its relation to cognition for over 20 years (which happened to be a central focus of my first book, Self and Society, published in 1985), I don't remember the last time a journalist told me that I should make use of what "we" know about emotion and that if I, too, just read an occasional book by Damasio, I could share Brooks' "more sophisticated view." But Brooks' admonition was perplexing in another sense, as it made me wonder again whether he'd even read the book or had instead just relied on the salon chatter of his conservative colleagues. It's difficult to imagine that he did, in fact, read the book in light of the following passage, which followed a chapter describing the co-evolution of reason and emotion in the brain and another describing how reason and emotion interact in the political brain:

The vision of mind, brain, and emotion I have presented in this chapter and the last is very different from the vision that has dominated much of Western thinking about judgment, decision making, and political behavior over the last three centuries. Emotions provide a "compass" that leads us toward and away from things, people, or actions associated with positive or negative states. Organisms survived for millions of years without consciousness and without the faculty philosophers have extolled for 2,500 years as "reason." They learned to avoid aversive stimuli and seek rewarding ones, and it is the ancestors of those primitive organisms--including ourselves--who survived, reproduced, and exist today. With the evolution of our most refined neural circuitry came not only our capacity for reason but also our capacity to be guided by rich, complex, emotional-laden networks...

If Brooks wants to write a snide, dismissive review of a book in the New York Times, I suggest next time he read it first, so that he can tailor his snideness to the substance. And next time he wants to undermine a book, I recommend that he not illustrate its central thesis through his own words.

Drew Westen, Ph.D., is professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University. He is the author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

Comments

[martinspringfield]

David Brooks took the PJ O'Rourke schtick, added some slight upwardly furrowed middlebrow Dennis Miller touches, and produced a moderately amusing but enormously tedious tome of pseudo-sociology about yuppies. And that was the starting point.

Today he has devolved to sub-Safire levels, alternating between dishonest and delusional. He is now so shrill that he's a human dog whistle, and you would need a canine translator to make sense of most of what he shrieks.

[cheerleaderBush]

David Brooks is one of the many media whores whose hack writing has kept the profoundly corrupt and incompetent Bush administration in office (and out of prison...which is where they belong).

... and the NYTimes also have a few other "writers" that fit sqarely into the same category (Friedman, Gordon, Ignatius, ex-Judith Miller, etc).

Unfortunately Brooks like Friedman are frequently invited to the Sunday morning talk shows... usually under the guise to present the 'progressive' or liberal side of the discussion... you know, since they write for the NYT (yea right!)

[AnotherunhappyDemocrat]

Like others, I used to think that though I disagreed with David Brooks, I still found that he had something to say in his articles. Either I was grossly mistaken, or Brooks has given up on the whole substance thing. I'm starting to think that he isn't that bright, nor he is remotely close to being the "public intellectual" he views himself as.

[SouthernDemocratDFW]

Meanwhile, right wing money continues to buy media of all sorts at any cost.
Book reviews are just the a tiny part of the spectrum.
Thanks for an enlightening look at a really frightening subject.

[brixtony]

This response has substantially increased my interest in reading your book.
I find it both puzzling, and sadly diagnostic of our times, that the Times [and PBS, etc] keeps this weak and deceitful scribbler on the books.
I think of Brooks as a "wishy-washy" conservative. He has the thin veneer of "liberal" reasonableness that disguises his seething anger against his age-cohort and his intellectually dishonest arguments. Most of all, he seems, as shown by this review, to be mentally and professionally lazy. I find him to be a whiny complainer who staggers from point to point without a well-articulated philosophy, despite the fact that he is constantly paid a fee to sit in front of a camera when the MSM needs a polite apologist for the neo-cons. I wish that the NYT would seek out a real conservative who really does the work and presents arguments that can stand up to scrutiny and challenge my thinking. Safire did serve this function for me. I disagreed with him regularly, but could respect where he was coming from.

[MJS]

I have seen (and noted, by gum) David Brooks' physical posture on television, and its evolution through these past seven years. I don't have the tapes to prove this, but what I have observed is the increasingly droopy posture he assumes, his head going down, down, down as he repeats by rote conservative talking points, as if his neck has responded to what comes out of his mouth with a steady disapproval. His eyes look down, his shoulders hunch, all while speaking. When silent, he beams and works his mouth into a smile that he aims in the general direction of whoever else is speaking, with just enough lateral shake of his skull to intimate the potential folly of another's argument or observation.

Perhaps when he writes he is strengthened via the aid of a collar or brace, and so can manage to finish his work without his face striking the keyboard. He is a disengenous man, whose moral fiber is now an attenuated ligament above his collar bone, making its own protest as best it can.

The New York Review of Books? It's still called that? Fascinating. I thought it had died some time ago.

++++

[raker]

David Brooks and William Safire are worse than the majority of right-wing blowhards on the 24-hour propaganda channels. They are sophists, intelligent men bring people into the tent with their apparent wisdom and reasonableness, whose mission is to convince readers to believe things they themselves know to be untrue. Congenital liars, if you like. It's a betrayal on a par with Colin Powell's. Utterly loathsome and unforgiveable.

[kindofblue]

A very good post, and a clear indicator of where our battle plans should focus.

First, a calm and reasoned dissection of Brooks' argument. He's been playing the dispassionate intellectual for far too long, and he's met his match with your rebuttal. It's quite obvious he either hasn't read or understood your work.

Second, your argument is right on! That's exactly what Gore should have said. How could anyone have missed what a total loser Bush was? The take away is: no mercy to these fools going forward. They have degraded us, no, defiled us beyond any reasonable comprehension. It's not a question of revenge, but of restoring maturity to our country. Really, it's realizing that Bush/Rove hate this country and the profundity of its Constitution and institutions.

[waiguoren]

If today's (8/28/08 ) NYT comments by David Brooks is not the most absurd bit of writing ever to appear on those pages, I'd like to know what is.
Brooks claims that the failure of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General is due to his being some sort of outsider, anti-establishment figure, and that we's best go back to listening to what Brooks calls "elite opinion" ( his, bo doubt ) when seeking future presidential appointees.
Are you certain he gets paid for this drivel? Or, as Steve Martin would call it, pure drivel.

[mr. d.]

Does anybody remember after one of the debates before the 2004 presidential election when David Brooks was been used as an expert analyst on one of the networks? I think it was PBS. He was making some less than favourable comments about former president Jimmy Carter. At some point he realized that Mr. Carter had walked into room (he was the next guest). The look of surprise and, I believe, embarassment on Brooks face, as well as the look of amusement on the face of Mr. Carter was,as they say, priceless.

[WilliePilgrim]

Is not Brooks, for all his eloquence, the epitome of insecurity? A worrisome hand wringer who has neurotically interpreted history and current events in such a way that the whiteness of his shirts and underwear, beneath is crisp tailored suits are the true signs of civility and anything that threatens that niceness is to ba avoided less we discover that we are indeed, just devilishly clever monkeys.

[joja]

And everybody thinks Karl Rove has "retired?"

No way! Rove & Brooks & Kristol & the countless other morally bankrupt vermin asssociated with the WH scum have only begun their 2008 strategy, with the surprise of a pre-, or possibly, post-election coup as the ultimate option.

Remember the Emergency Powers Act signed by Bush in May of this year, which provides for a takeover of all powers by the executive branch in time of a national emergency?

Can you spell "invasion of Iran" or "phoney terrorist threat?"

And let's not forget Cheney's personal Praetorian Guard -- Blackwater -- who's always ready to help in the overthrow.

[jazzman]

Great argument regarding Gore and the Democrats. I'm reading Emotional Intelligence, and Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman and just got through reading the Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. All of these books, based on exhaustive research, make similar points to your research.

You also bring up the most basic point about sales. Which is never to say 'no.' If you must say 'no' you say, "I can't do that but here is what I can do." It sounds like the same holds true for politics, "I'm not proud of what Clinton did in his personal life but here is what I'm proud of..." Gore's consultants told him to ignore Bush's attempt to associate him with Clinton rather than deal with it straight ahead and he did so at his own peril. Four years later, Kerry did the same thing when the swift boaters arrived. Two similar strategies; two similar results.

It's time for Democrats to get on board and start using this updated research regarding how humans think and make decisions; the brain is wired to make decisions using both the emotional and rational faculties but the emotions can be hijacked and used to override the rational aspects of thinking. Even before contemporary brain research, Freud and Jung told us this decades ago but the message hasn't yet got to the Democrats and their consultants.

One last remark: Brooks is mostly snide, cynical, and dismissive of the motives and positions taken by Democrats. He uses that kind of subtle emotional tone constantly on PBS and in his columns. Using that emotional strategy underscores all of his 'so-called' rational thought.

[ProfessorDuh]

David Brooks is preening slime.

[BrooklynC]

David Brooks is so ubiquitous that every time I see his name or hear his voice in an unaccustomed place, I wonder where he finds the time to do all these things, and Sunday's appearance in the Book Review was no exception. Mr. Westen answered one question--Brooks sometimes finds the time by avoiding the basic task, in this case reading the book he purports to review.

As to Mr. Westen's point about the Book Review's "right-wing editor," I guess the pressure of a regular job is too much for Sam Tanenhaus (whose sympathetic biography of Whitaker Chambers was persuasive and reasoned). He fails to ensure that a hatchet job like Brooks' meets the same standards of fairness that he wished had been accorded to Chambers. It's all of a piece--Brooks is too busy to read the book, and Tanenhaus is too busy to edit the review. The loop is as neatly closed as Fox News.