I want to devote my post today to David Brooks's column from yesterday's New York Times, called "A Moderate Manifesto." As I have mentioned before, Brooks is my favorite columnist these days, and he is also someone I have known for some years now. But he'd be a favorite even had I never met him because we are mostly on the same wavelength with regard to practically everything, not least our appreciation of Edmund Burke. 

So it is relatively rare when I do differ with him. But I do differ with him over yesterday's column in one minor and one perhaps not so minor way. 

First of all, yesterday's column is noteworthy for the pivot the author has made, from being a conditional admirer and tentative supporter of the President to one who now seems to have broken with him fairly sharply. Barack Obama, says Brooks, presuming to speak for moderates of all stripes, "is not who we thought he was." That's fighting language. 

We thought, presumably, that he was thoughtful; understood tradeoffs; accepted moral realism a la Neibuhr; recognized the need to set priorities; meant it when he spoke of his fear of deficit spending; and so on and on. The rhetoric was right. But, says Brooks, the ten-year-plan budget shows him to be a transformationalist liberal fronting "a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new", a man who thinks he can solve all problems at once, who is for the first time ever using class war as a motif of political mobilization, and so on. For David, this is not just a moderate's manifesto, it's a declaration of political warfare against the Administration.

The minor error in this, I think, is the contention that Obama is using class warfare tropes for the first time. Not so; it's been done before and Democrats have attempted it in recent memory, as well -- Al Gore in his desperate 2000 campaign, and John Edwards always. That said, I did not like it during the campaign and I don't like it now. It is divisive and hypocritical coming from a man who swore to overcome destructive partisanship in Washington. How do you speak bipartisanship out of one side of your mouth and wage class war out of the other?  A lamentable sight. 

But it cuts both ways. One aspect of the budget proposal I like very much is the intention of ripping agribusiness off of the public teat. But then why did Obama vote for the farm bill, while McCain had the courage to call a corporate welfare program what it was and vote against it?  Cuts both ways, as I said.

The major difference I have with the column, and the reason I am not ready to join Brooks's Raiders just yet, is that I think David might be missing a seemingly minor, pedestrian, but perhaps powerfully explanatory fact. Maybe the gap is not between Obama's rhetoric and his policies, as expressed so far mainly in the budget proposal, but between his objectives and the lack of foot-soldiers, warm bodies, he has with which to accomplish them. As many, including Brooks, have earlier argued, Obama has ceded a great deal of operational authority for putting legislation together to the Democrats in Congress and their staffs. If Obama, or Rahm Emanuel, or anyone else thinks that Pelosi, Reid and company are really Obama's allies in any but a superficial way, they need to think again. They will not join the President at the barricades when he fights K Street and their smarmy lobbyists. They'll be on the other side. If you were in any doubt about this before yesterday, note how Pelosi, Reid and Steny Hoyer responded to the President's entirely reasonable plea that they rethink the whole idea of earmarks. They told him, pretty much, to go to hell, that it was none of his business. I hope Obama isn't surprised.

Brooks himself already made this general point in discussing healthcare reform a few days ago, and ended with an observation that once you sound the trumpet you have to actually charge. Well, charge with who by his side exactly? Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and, well, er.....you see the problem. This is a one-term Senator who never put together a crew of staff or supporters, who was never a governor like Carter and Clinton who could bring a shell administration of loyalists to Washington with him. He has a very thin bench. I think what we're seeing so far is not, or not necessarily, evidence of a leftist having used centrist moderate language to get elected and fool everyone, but rather evidence of a guy who doesn't have many specific programmatic ideas of his own and who doesn't yet have a serious professional staff loyal to him who can devise many such ideas and shove them effectively forward -- at least not as long as he is spending most of his day with Summers ad Geithner worried sick over the economy, and as long as more than have his appointments have not been nominated or confirmed.  

Of course, time will tell who is right.

How can Obama acquire the foot soldiers I think be needs? Here's one way.  Really screw up and look bad so that the GOP makes a major comeback in the 2010 mid-term election, after which the GOP will fail because its main ranks have no ideas, after which a new crop of Democrats beholden to the Obama White House will come in in 2012, so that all the hard stuff will then get done early in the second term. You heard it here first......

Just one more possibly useful if somewhat random remark. I went to what I call the Zbiginar yesterday--that's Zbigniew Brzezinski's bimonthly seminar on the 8th floor of SAIS's Rome Building. I've been a regular now for more than a decade. Anyway, the speaker yesterday was a Dutch-born economist named Peter Bottelier--an expert on China's economy, and that's what he spoke about. I won't go into the particulars, but I want to mention only one piece of phraseology he used in passing that reminded me of something important I once learned years ago--I think maybe from a book either by Ernst Gellner or Robert MacIver, I can't remember, alas--but had forgotten to my regret.  It's a simple distinction, but simple in the way of all things profound.

Bottelier distinguished between upward accountability and downward accountability as being the most important way to understand the difference between autocratic and democratic political systems. Upward accountability in autocratic system is where at every level functionaries care about pleasing those above them, not those below them. Those above are the ones who have power, who can make or break, and the system accumulates a bias toward conformity if it is a system of upward accountability. (This is my adumbration of the idea, you will forgive me.) Downward accountability is when at every level functionaries care as much or more about those below them, because they are the ones, with their opinions, tax monies and votes, who can make or break. This too accumulates from level to level into a genuinely participatory system that rewards a bias toward diversity, debate, openness, transparency. 

The distinction is useful because it allows one to apply a powerful sociological lens on political labels and facades. Look at Iran. Iran has elections, and the semblance of democratic procedures. But it is overwhelmingly characterized by upward accountability. Look at Japan.  It's an interesting mix; lots of deference upward, far more than in Europe or the U.S., but also a fair bit downward. Japan is thus a more autocratically feeling democratic political system, a more patriarchical one, than other modern democracies.  (I wonder about South Korea in this regard, but I have only been there once and don't now enough about Korean culture to venture a view.) 

On the other hand, and I am not trying to be facetious here, look at al-Qaeda. It's hardly democratic in any technical or literal sense, but at least the charismatic figures who make up the mid-level hubs of its spoke-and-hub system are downward accountability inclined, because if they don't take care of their charges, they won't keep them for long. This contrasts very sharply with patriarchal Arab regimes in general (note here Hisham Sharabi's theory of neo-patriarchy to explain Arab politics, which I think has a lot to commend it), which are among the most upward accountable regimes on the planet. Given the contrast, it's not so hard to see why so many ordinary Arabs are torn between al-Qaeda's more open internal culture and a set of religious views few really agree with.

It strikes me that if we think of these two forms of accountability not as a dichotomous variable--like and on/off switch--but as a continuum, then it could be used to make some interesting observations, and perhaps produce some useful counterintuitive insights.