Slaying Strawmen

David Brooks has a column up today in the New York times entitled "When Obamatons Respond". Basically Brooks uses the new en vogue technique of invoking "unnamed sources" to write a column about how he says some people in the White House responded to his previous high concern troll column about President Obama's budget. Funny, but I thought there used to be some parameters for using unnamed sources higher than them just telling you not to use their name. Nowadays however you would be hard pressed to find an article in a major newspaper that doesn't include quotes or thoughts from anonymous figures. But I digress.

Now some people will see this as progress since it would seem that Brooks is including the thoughts of people in the Obama administration in his discussion about his vision for the future of our country. But Brooks starts just about every paragraph with strawmen that only a Republican could love. So what I am going to do is excerpt from his article crossing out the strawman so you can get a feel for what was probably actually said by these unnamed officials and perhaps you can get the effect of how they probably actually responded rather than how Brooks wanted to frame it.

In the first place, they do not see themselves as a group of liberal crusaders. They see themselves as pragmatists who inherited a government and an economy that have been thrown out of whack. They’re not engaged in an ideological project to overturn the Reagan Revolution, a fight that was over long ago. They’re trying to restore balance: nurture an economy so that productivity gains are shared by the middle class and correct the irresponsible habits that developed during the Bush era.

The budget, they continue, isn’t some grand transformation of America. It raises taxes on energy and offsets them with tax cuts for the middle class. It raises taxes on the rich to a level slightly above where they were in the Clinton years and then uses the money as a down payment on health care reform. That’s what the budget does. It’s not the Russian Revolution.

Second, they argue, the Obama administration will not usher in an era of big government. Federal spending over the last generation has been about 20 percent of G.D.P. This year, it has surged to about 27 percent. But they aim to bring spending down to 22 percent of G.D.P. in a few years. And most of the increase, they insist, is caused by the aging of the population and the rise of mandatory entitlement spending. It’s not caused by big increases in the welfare state.

snip

Fourth, the White House claims the budget will not produce a sea of red ink. Deficits are now at a gargantuan 12 percent of G.D.P., but the White House aims to bring this down to 3.5 percent in 2012. Besides, the long-range debt is what matters, and on this subject President Obama is hawkish.

He is extremely committed to entitlement reform and is plotting politically feasible ways to reduce Social Security as well as health spending. The White House folks didn’t say this, but I got the impression they’d be willing to raise taxes on the bottom 95 percent of earners as part of an overall package.

Now at the end Brooks still wasn't at all convinced which leads me to ask why would anyone in the Obama administration try to convince him in the first place. That's what makes me suspicious of the whole supposed exchange, especially when there isn't one single solitary actual quote included in the article. Its just all his paraphrasing sprinkled with plenty of strawmen. Put together it adds up to yet another Brooks high concern troll editorial but I am sure plenty of Villagers will hold it up as some kind of gold standard of centrist journalism since after all its David Brooks.