The Mobilization Error David Brooks – The New York Times I want to like David Brooks. I really do. I want to be able to tell people that I read his columns from time to time and agree with some of his points. And sometimes I do. But in the vast majority of cases I find myself nauseated by his holier-than-thou attitude about politics, life and humanity. Remember his column on marijuana, for instance – “ Weed. Been There. Done That. ” Good for you, Dave.  I digress. His most recent article starts off by drawing a thoughtful distinction between two types of presidential campaigns: Every serious presidential candidate has to answer a fundamental strategic question: Do I think I can win by expanding my party’s reach, or do I think I can win by mobilizing my party’s base? So far, so good. He opines that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is following the latter strategy – that is, mobilizing the party’s base. Fair enough. However, Brooks loses me when begins to lament that Clinton will adopt left-leaning policy positions carefully designed to energize the Obama coalition — African-Americans, Latinos, single women and highly educated progressives. Oh, the horror! Because the last thing you want to do as a candidate is “carefully design” a campaign which courts disadvantaged groups and listens to well-educated individuals. But the barbarity of Clinton’s strategy isn’t just its misplaced energy, Brooks argues, it’s that [Her] strategy is bad, first, for the country…Politics is broken today because [coalition building politicians] have been replaced by highly polarizing, base-mobilizing politicians who hew to party orthodoxy, ignore the 38 percent of voters who identify as moderates and exacerbate partisanship and gridlock. If Clinton decides to be just another unimaginative base-mobilizing politician, she will make our broken politics even worse. He then goes onto list four reasons why Hillary’s African-American loving, single women pandering campaign is just so awful for our … Continue reading Daily Clips: June 9th, 2015