David Brooks blows it again

Bob Somerby, intrepid tracker of the establisment press on his The Daily Howler website, properly upbraids David Brooks for continuing to regurgitate the Republican talking point of the week:

Here is Brooks, not only using poor taste to play off Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, one that is now properly in the special collection of the most revered American speeches (would he have paraphrased the “Gettysburg Address” for such a petty purpose of trashing the good faith of Nancy Pelosi?). Besides that, he also strategically creates separation from George Bush while reverting to channeling what fundamentally is a silly Republican talking point:

I have a dream, my friends. I have a dream that we are approaching the day when a ranch-owning millionaire Republican like George Bush will make peace with a vineyard-owning millionaire Democrat like Nancy Pelosi.

I have a dream that Pelosi, who was chauffeured to school as a child and who, with her investor husband, owns minority shares in the Auberge du Soleil resort hotel and the CordeValle Golf Club, will look over her famous strand of South Sea Tahitian pearls and forge bonds of understanding with the zillionaire corporate barons in the opposing party.

I’m surprised he didn’t accuse Pelosi of being “a traitor to her class” – the upper crust’s favorite pejorative for FDR. Brooks’ purpose, of course, is the desperate one of continuing to drive a wedge between the Democratic Party and working-class America – retaining the loyalty of so-called “Reagan Democrats – by pretending that wealth precludes people like Pelosi, Kerry or Gore from being real, or small-d democrats. Early on, they did the chauffeured-to-school meme on Gore, too. As if both expressed and actual historical policies and primary sources of political support mean nothing, and the near-worship directed towards FDR and JFK by the poor and minorities was a mirage.

Besides that, the implication that Pelosi was born with that kind of silver spoon in her mouth apparently is a crock. In fact, hers was a political family, a deeply Democratic political family in the old Baltimore neighborhood, so her progressive bona fides are, well bona fide, even if her family wasn’t mired in poverty that Brooks, the Marxist economic determinist when it serves his purposes, suggests is a necessity for being a Democrat.

Here is the way someone profiling her last year in the Washington Post described Pelosi’s upbringing:

And even though the D'Alesandros could have moved away from the neighborhood's narrow streets and tight rowhouses, they stayed, no matter the patriarch's success.
That is one reason for the degree of pride that folks there express for Pelosi's success -- her family stayed rooted right with the rest of them.
"She wasn't born with a silver spoon, growing up around here," says Marion "Mugs" Mugavero, 84, who ran his confectionery for 59 years. "She grew up like the rest of us."

Except that her father became the go-to guy for Baltimore politics, a man with visitors from high places. "He was good friends with Harry Truman," recalls Dominic "Fuzzy" Leonardi, 80. "When Truman was running for president, [Big Tommy] went and picked him up and brought him to his house" in a 1936 Plymouth.