I agree with much of Brooks’ analysis today, and I’m totally with him that Obama’s stimulus plan has revealed him to be a conventional liberal. But I have one problem with his argument. He writes:

….So an important question for the Obama presidency is this: Will his transformational style eventually lead to transformational policies, or will his conventional policies eventually force him to shelve his transformational style?
In the first major episode of his administration, the stimulus package, the conventional policies so far have won. The Obama administration sent a series of stimulus principles to Capitol Hill and allowed the Old Bulls in the House and Senate to write legislation. They produced sprawling bills that gathered dozens of traditional liberal ideas. The resulting bills would have been no different if Nancy Pelosi had been elected president, or Harry Reid, or any other conventional Democrat.
The substance of the legislation set up the polarized debate that followed. Liberal interest groups were happy. Conservative Republicans were united in opposition. But something interesting happened this week. The momentum of the debate was set by moderates. Conservative protests wouldn’t have amounted to much without nagging moderate unease.

He then uses this left-right fight to express his hope that the moderates in both parties — a new, permanent “gang system” — will drive policy. Now, he may be right that the moderates have the better policy arguments. Sometimes that happens, and there’s nothing written in stone that says the moderates or centrists (not always the same thing, by the way) can’t be more right than the left or the right. But there’s nothing written in stone that says they are better than the left or right. Difference splitting can be great, or it can make things worse. I could use a bit more argumentation about why the moderates have the right ideas rather than a sort of intellectual triangulation which assumes that anything that short-circuits the “old left-right fights” is better than a left-right fight.