All of a sudden he's talking about the Democrats as if he actually takes their programs and ideas seriously. Last week it was Hillary Clinton, and this week he's examining the poverty programs of John Edwards and Barack Obama with nary a Republican harrumph about "personal responsibility" or "re-open the orphanages and workhouses." And even more worrisome is that he's even tangentially embracing the "it takes a village" approach of Hillary Clinton that caused so much right-wing mockery.
Obama and Edwards agree on a lot, but in this matter they emphasize different things. As Alec MacGillis of The Washington Post observed, Edwards emphasizes programs that help people escape from concentrated poverty. Obama emphasizes programs that fix inner-city neighborhoods. One helps people find better environments, the other seeks to strengthen the environment they are already in.I know that of the conservative columnists out there, Mr. Brooks comes across as the more "organic" of the lot; he actually believes that the poor and the less-fortunate among us are people, as opposed to the hard-core wingnuts who see them purely as a mass to be manipulated and coerced during the run-up to an election and demonized or ignored the rest of the time. (George F. Will has often said that "Republicans aren't supposed to be nice. They're supposed to be pragmatic." Live long and prosper.) So when Mr. Brooks starts to sagely consider the poverty proposals of two Democratic candidates, it's not a complete surprise; he's shown glimmers of GOP apostasy before. That he gives both the Obama and Edwards programs the surface treatment without examining the rest of the layers of each is also not surprising, but when you see a pig fly, you don't criticize it for its awkward technique.
Edwards would create a million housing vouchers for working families. These would, he argues, “enable people to vote with their feet to demand safe communities with good schools.” They’d help people move to where the jobs are and foster economic integration.
The problem with his approach is that past efforts at dispersal produced disappointing results. Families who were given the means to move from poor neighborhoods to middle-class areas did not see incomes rise. Girls in those families did a little better, but boys did worse. They quickly formed subcultures in the new communities that replicated patterns of the old ones. Male criminality rose, but test scores did not.
Obama, by contrast, builds his approach around the Harlem Children’s Zone, what he calls “an all-encompassing, all-hands-on-deck anti-poverty effort.” The zone takes an area in Harlem and saturates it with childcare, marriage counseling, charter schools and job counselors and everything else you can think of. Obama says he’ll start by replicating the program in 20 cities around the country.
The problem here is that there are few historical examples of neighborhoods being lifted up at once. There are 4,000 community development corporations around the country and they have not lifted residents out of poverty. The positive influences in the center get overwhelmed by the negative peer influences all around.
[...]
If I had to choose between the two, I guess I’d go with the Obama plan. I’d lean that way because Obama seems to have a more developed view of social capital. Edwards offers vouchers, job training and vows to create a million temporary public-sector jobs. Obama agrees, but takes fuller advantage of home visits, parental counseling, mentoring programs and other relationship-building efforts.
The Obama policy provides more face-to-face contact with people who can offer praise or disapproval. Rising out of poverty is difficult — even when there are jobs and good schools. It’s hard to focus on a distant degree or home purchase. But human beings have a strong desire for approval and can accomplish a lot with daily doses of praise and censure. Standards of behavior are contagious that way.
A neighborhood is a moral ecosystem, and Obama, the former community organizer, seems to have a better feel for that. It’s not only policies we’re looking for in selecting a leader, it’s a sense of how the world works. Obama’s plan isn’t a sure-fire cure for poverty, but it does reveal an awareness of the supple forces that can’t be measured and seen.
And at least Mr. Brooks is giving some time and column space to these programs. So far the GOP field has said little and offered nothing more than lip service in the way of combating poverty -- unless you think joining the military to fight the never-ending battle of the war on terror is the answer to everything.
So I'm beginning to wonder if Mr. Brooks is having an epiphany about the conservatives and the people he's been so devoted to for so long and will start championing the Democrats. Recently on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer he seemed to be waffling on the war in Iraq, saying aloud how "confused" he was about the outcome. Could he be having a true change of heart, or is he just being pragmatic -- or opportunistic -- by figuring out that he'd rather be on the winning side and get to sit at the Kool Kidz table? Stay tuned, but I'm willing to bet that within a week he'll be back to the orthodoxy; a phone call from Karl -- or a horse's head in the bed -- will get the point across.
