David Brooks Dissects Obama's Personality?

In today's New York Times, David Brooks writes an article on Obama's emotional state. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/opinion/17brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Go read it & come back here.

I'm no fan of David Brooks. He regularly dry-heaves opinions from a stomach empty of facts. This week, he's trying to convince us that McCain's violent temper isn't actually a liability but a sign of passion. To make that argument, he twists the fact that Obama is a calm, stable, and reasoning man into a suggestion that he would be a dispassionate and unengaged president. He can't come out and praise McCain for being passionate (everyone would just laugh him off the page) -- he has to leave that inference to the reader.

Brooks is not qualified to draw a direct causal relationship between Obama's upbringing and ambition driven by a need to satisfy some unfilled need. Even if everyone with such an upbringing had the "scars" Brooks describes (a point I'm not ready to concede), how many have been able to get where Obama is now?

More importantly, what's the difference between someone being driven to fill a "void" and being driven by a "desire to realize some capacity in their nature"? Aren't "fill a void" and "desire to realize" essentially identical objectives? He's created a dichotomy where none exists.

I think Brooks reads too much into the fact that Obama doesn't telegraph all his emotions during debates. Brooks sees a candidate that doesn't express every emotion as it strikes him (like McCain's furious blinking and grimacing) or get angry when attacked (which at this moment would turn off voters) and decides that Obama is a cold, dispassionate observer rather than an engaged participant. Brooks confuses Obama's control over expressing his emotions with a lack of passion.

Obama is a normal, emotional father and family man when he's playing basketball or interacting with his family. He's not a robot. But neither, thank god, is he a violent, angry, uncontrolled man who is unable to control himself. Don't forget that we've already had 8 years of a spoiled, petulant brat as president. It's time for a change.