Opinionator | The Conversation: Happy New Year, Politicians. Seriously.

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Tags:

Cheney, Liz, Clinton, Hillary Rodham, Cruz, Ted, de Blasio, Bill, Obama, Barack, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010), United States Politics and Government

GAIL COLLINS: Happy New Year, David! I'm glad you're back and that we're going to start conversing again. What are you expecting, politically speaking, for 2014? It doesn't really seem possible that things could get much worse.

DAVID BROOKS: It's bound to be much better. I'm thinking that the early days of the Ted Cruz versus Al Franken presidential campaign will be particularly genial. Also I'm pretty sure that the seventh year of the Obamacare debate is going to yield fresh insights.

GAIL: See, this is why I missed you.

DAVID: I'm struck by the way the two parties have embraced the culture of gift exchange. First the Republicans gave Democrats the gift of the government shutdown. Then the Democrats reciprocated by screwing up Obamacare. Nothing so demonstrates the spirit of bipartisanship as the willingness to commit political suicide on behalf of your opponents.

GAIL: In the first column you wrote after you returned, you urged people to spend less time obsessing about politics. I totally agreed with what I took to be your message — that the hysteria driven by right-wing talk radio and blogs and cable TV has created an impossible situation in Washington where even the most mundane functions of government can't be accomplished. Or in other words, that the Tea Party ruined everything.

Am I overinterpreting?

DAVID: I think this might be a case of motivated cognition. I was trying to say that while government is important — just ask people who live in lawless places — very few people have their ultimate happiness and fulfillment shaped by it. It was Samuel Johnson's point: "How small, of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure."

GAIL: I always feel at a disadvantage when you start quoting Samuel Johnson.

Politics is basically who gets what, and how much. Which does sound unprofound. But really, those are the questions at the root of life: How do we organize ourselves? When do we share? What goals do we hold in common? It can dwindle down to hysteria over polls and strategy, but even then, when you look underneath the spinning, it's about very, very important stuff. Plus, I'd argue that it's more fun than watching Texas beat Duke in the Chick-fil-A Bowl.

DAVID: Not to be pedantic, but that was Texas A&M over Duke. And if you would rather watch Jack Lew than Johnny Manziel, I think you are in the smallest minority in statistical history.

I do remain mystified by why cable TV is so politics obsessed. When I write a political column, it gets, let's say, an average reaction of 7 on the response scale. When I write something about values or culture, it gets a reaction of 14. Yet on cable TV hardly anyone is talking about values and culture.

GAIL: I am going to refrain from saying something snooty about cable TV's strong dedication to exploring our cultural values as expressed through sex-murder trials. Instead, give me your quick take on Obamacare. You see it as a perfect example of government overreach.

DAVID: I see it as an example of central planners trying to corral a dynamic, complex system, and making a mess out of it. Either you have a truly centralized single-payer system or you have a truly decentralized market-based system. This hybrid of semi-centralized, semi-market-based may magically combine the disadvantages of each approach.

Campaign finance reform is like that, too. We should either have straight up public funding of elections, or complete transparency in political giving.

GAIL: I'm with you on the single-payer option. If only the president had not taken the path that was touted by several generations of Republican deep thinkers.

DAVID: To be fair, the Republican plans never had the centralized decision making of Obamacare. And by the way, I don't think the country will accept single payer. Voters, even Democratic voters, aren't going to be comfortable with a system that revolves around Washington.

GAIL: I'd certainly like to have a serious national conversation about it. Which we never did. Do you remember during the 2008 campaign, when Obama kept saying that the negotiations between the administration and the insurance companies over health care ought to be put on C-Span? Makes me sad to think about it.

You've written that Obamacare's fatal flaw is its requirement that young people buy insurance, even though the odds are they won't need it. Can you run that by me again? It seems totally fair — and totally conservative — to say that young adults should buy catastrophic insurance so if some disaster does happen, they won't become a long-term burden on their parents or their government.

DAVID: I'm all for people buying catastrophic insurance. I'm not for forcing young, poorer people to purchase products that are not in their best interest just so we can invisibly subsidize other people. If we want to redistribute, we should do it openly.

GAIL: Well, I'm for forcing older people to subsidize younger people's higher education by paying more taxes to reduce the cost of public colleges. Sometimes you pay more than your share, but you get to be part of a community that's healthy and smart. In a way, life is one big insurance pool.

DAVID: Well, yes, but the public seems to have a problem with coercion in any form. Government programs have to be built around the paradigm of individual choice, even if they nudge those choices one way or another. Other paradigms are just not culturally acceptable anymore.

GAIL: Please, let's talk about politics for a little bit. New York has a new mayor, Bill de Blasio, who won by talking about reducing the gap between the rich and the poor. In one way, he's an excellent example of all the things you've been telling me you dislike. On the other hand, he's talking about values and morality.

DAVID: Yup. I'd say there's a natural inequality debate to be had. One side would say the economic system is fundamentally broken and government needs to aggressively redistribute wealth. The other side would say that the economic system is not fundamentally broken and we mainly need to invest in human capital so more people can have access to it. Unfortunately for the Republicans, the partisans on both sides of that debate are now part of the Democratic Party.

GAIL: As a political junkie I love the idea of having a real conversation about the two Americas. As a student of New York City politics, I'm having trouble imagining how de Blasio will get where he wants to go.

But what about the rest of the country? Can the Republicans take control of the Senate this fall? And now that we're only two years away from the Iowa caucuses, we no longer have the moral authority to put our fingers in our ears and howl when somebody starts talking about the presidential race.

DAVID: I think Republicans have a decent chance of taking control of the Senate. Then the party will nominate Rand Paul in 2016, and the Paul-Rubio ticket will carry several important counties in Alabama and Mississippi and the Republicans will lose Congress again.

You think I'm kidding with this prediction. But I'm not, at least not entirely.

GAIL: Poor David. No wonder you've sounded so anti-political.

You recently urged readers to look at government as a "mundane and limited thing." What candidates are you looking at who seem best adapted to the task?

DAVID: If voters were daft enough to give me sole power to pick the president, I'd choose Bob Gates, the former defense secretary.

GAIL: I don't know of any politician who likes wrestling with the mundane and limited more than Hillary Clinton. If she'd won the presidency in 2008, I don't think she'd ever have forced the health care act into law. I don't say that as a compliment, exactly.

DAVID: Let's not whitewash the Ira Magaziner/Hillarycare episode.

GAIL: Ah, the Clinton health care proposal. Back in the days of yore, when giants roamed the earth and senators still engaged in bipartisan drinking sessions.

DAVID: If she can prove that she now understands that dumb, simple laws are better than smart, complex ones, I could definitely feel some comfort with her. I do think she is hardheaded and practical. If she runs against Ted Cruz, I'm going to be in an awful pickle.

GAIL: Hey, I was planning to denounce Ted Cruz! Then I figured you would suggest some Republican governor who I don't know enough about to criticize. I have always been in awe of your governor repertoire. Anybody you like running Iowa or Indiana this time around?

DAVID: I do like Indiana Governor Mike Pence. But it's almost time to unfurl my quadrennial John Thune column. He's nice, conservative, good-looking and tall.

GAIL: Well, our new mayor in New York is really tall. He's green, but he looms.

Which Senate race are you going to watch closely? I'm eyeing West Virginia. The Democrats look as if they'll have a better candidate than they expected originally. More important, West Virginia is one of the six states I've never visited.

DAVID: You've never been to West Virginia? It's like 90 minutes from Washington! I am definitely organizing a rafting trip for all the Op-Ed columnists down the New River. I see us beginning the trip arguing about who gets to steer, and then ending up either in a state of blissful comradeship or else having committed acts of cannibalism.

GAIL: A really great potential movie script. What are your states to watch?

DAVID: I'll be watching Wyoming, where I'm guessing Mike Enzi and the Republican establishment will beat Liz Cheney. In the fall, I'll watch Georgia, where Sam Nunn's daughter Michelle Nunn is probably going to be the Democratic candidate. If a Democrat takes Georgia, then it's panic time for the G.O.P.

GAIL: The first time I ever went to Georgia was for a presidential-nominating convention. I was young and callow and working for a tabloid. I wrote a column making fun of Atlanta, and a stupendously nice guy from one of the local utilities called and volunteered to show me the best parts of the city. We wound up at a mall that he said was America's first shopping center. Still have warm feelings about Georgia from that trip.

DAVID: Have you noticed that every city in the country has America's first shopping center? That's what I love about this country.

GAIL: But one last question — how's your book going? I'm presuming you didn't finish it — actually finishing a book while you're on book leave is against the columnist code. But since it's about living a more profound inner life, I'm hoping you can share a couple of tips.

DAVID: Nope, didn't finish. Turns out I can write only two or three hours a day, no matter how many hours I clear out for it. My brain gets tired. Plus there were certain inhibitions built into the subject matter. One of the heroes of the book is Dorothy Day. She led this morally strenuous life all of her life, self-criticizing and writing and praying over her sins. But at the end of her life, she had achieved an impressive fullness, a centeredness and an overwhelming sense of gratitude.

One day she sat down to write a memoir. She told Robert Coles what happened next: "I wrote down the words, 'a life remembered,' and I was going to try to make a summary for myself, write what mattered most — but I couldn't do it. I just sat there and thought of our Lord, and His visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had Him on my mind for so long in my life!"

In other words, one of my heroes achieves the apotheosis of peace and self-surrender when she realizes she no longer needs to write anything. Kind of put a crimp in my work ethic.

A version of this article appears in print on 01/05/2014, on page SR9 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Happy New Year, Politicians. Seriously..

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