NP- David Brooks, Joe Klein, and the Courtier Press

[David Morris]

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/david-brooks-joe-klein-romney-10753130

That we have, in the main, a courtier press bringing us our political
news every day has been beyond question ever since Tim Crouse blew the
whistle in The Boys on the Bus back in 1973, only to have every
problem he identified in that book get immeasurably worse after he
published it. It is very simple these days. The primary job of an
elite political reporter — Joe Klein of Time, say, or David Brooks of
The New York Times — is to entertain and to comfort the real owners of
the country and its politics, to assure them from time to time that
they are really doing the right thing in their stewardship of what was
supposed to be a fractious, unruly self-governing republic. It is the
elite political reporter's job, upon request, to sing to the real
owners of the country a pleasant tune in a charming soprano voice. In
return, they become very important players in the increasingly
worthless puppet show that the real owners of the country are making
out of the politics of the country.

[...]

Both Klein and Brooks have taken to the public prints to reassure
Willard Romney — and, by proxy, all of the country's Willard Romneys —
that he is being treated so terribly unfairly, darling, by that man in
the White House who plainly does not know his place. First, we have
Brooks, who never saw a plutocrat for whom he wouldn't happily serve
as a footstool....

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Romney is going to have to define a vision of modern capitalism. He's
going to have to separate his vision from the scandals and excesses
we've seen over the last few years. He needs to define the kind of
capitalist he is and why the country needs his virtues. Let's face it,
he's not a heroic entrepreneur. He's an efficiency expert. It has been
the business of his life to take companies that were mediocre and
sclerotic and try to make them efficient and dynamic. It has been his
job to be the corporate version of a personal trainer: take people who
are puffy and self-indulgent and whip them into shape. That's his
selling point: rigor and productivity. If he can build a capitalist
vision around that, he'll thrive. If not, he's a punching bag.
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All those steelworkers, and the people at that paper company, they
were puffy and self-indulgent — and not hunks of iron-reinforced
man-flesh like, you know, David Brooks — and that's why none of them
have jobs anymore. People at the business end of the "system" that so
charms David Brooks over the canapes know the real score: The
"scandals and excesses" are the system. Take them away, and Romney is
clipping coupons back in Michigan.