One of my bedrock principles is that you should give credit where credit is due. David Brooks is my favorite columnist and he expresses my views with clarity, wit, and insight that I sorely lack. But Glenn Greenwald has written a tough (and pretty intemperate) critique that merits consideration from Brooks and other conservatives. Noting Brooks’s argument that the unpopularity of health reform means that Democrats should abandon their current effort, Greenwald writes:

I remember another policy that was even more unpopular with the “Ameican people” than Obama’s health care plan. It was called the Iraq War. Throughout 2006 and 2007, overwhelming majorities of Americans were not only opposed to the war, but favored a quick timetable for withdrawal. So intense was the opposition that the Republicans suffered one of the century’s most thorough and humiliating midterm election defeats in 2006. Yet there was David Brooks writing column after column demanding that public opinion be ignored,mocking withdrawal as deeply Unserious, advocating continued occupation, insisting that the superior wisdom of a select elite govern our policy rather than ignorant mass sentiment. Brooks and his neoconservative friends wanted to keep sending other Americans (but never themselves) off to that war to die even though only a small minority of citizens supported it. Marie Antoinette indeed. Opposition to Bush’s surge was particularly intense – close to 70% – yet Brooks was heaping praise on John McCain for ignoring public opinion and supporting Bush’s plan (“when the Iraq war was at its worst, and other candidates were hiding in the grass waiting to see how things would turn out, McCain championed the surge . . . . He did it knowing that it would cost him his media-darling status and probably the presidency. But for years he had hated the way the war was being fought. And when the opportunity to change it came, the only honorable course was to try“).

I happen to have agreed with Brooks then and I am sympathetic to his view now. It is important to identify a consistent reason why this is so. For me, the thread is pretty simple. Unlike Greenwald, I think that the Democratic reform model won’t work as intended, and that we’d be far better off starting from scratch. I would believe this if the Democratic reform model were far more popular than it is, and I’d want elected officials to act accordingly. In contrast, I believed that the surge strategy would work and I’m glad that President Bush did not embrace the majority view. I don’t expect Greenwald or anyone else to accept my conclusion if I don’t make an effective, convincing case.