In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.
David Brooks: I don't know about you, but I stink at book titles. I sweat and struggle and I just can't think of anything even slightly mediocre for my own opuses. I try to get inspired by the Internet lists of the best book titles ever. Some of them are humorous or mordant: "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" or "Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea" or "My Heart Is an Idiot." Some of them are just beautiful: "Everything Is Illuminated" or "One Hundred Years of Solitude" or "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." They are all 500 times better than anything I've ever come up with.
Gail Collins: What do you mean? "Bobos in Paradise" was a great title. But I do sympathize. When I did my first history book about American women, it came down to a last-minute meeting with some editors and marketing folk. I couldn't leave until we had an acceptable name. Which turned out to be "America's Women."
David: I mention this because while my title ideas are atrocious, there are not as bad as the titles given to Washington memoirs.
Gail: Before you go any further, let me tell you that my favorite title for a book by a Washington insider is "Adventures of a Nobody." That was Louisa Adams, John Quincy's wife. Not an easy guy to be married to, I believe. She also once complained about "the scorpion tongues of political scandal," which I stole for a book I wrote on that subject. The only problem was that some book sellers apparently stocked "Scorpion Tongues" in the natural history section.
I apologize. You were saying about memoirs.
David: When you're writing a Washington memoir, your goal, apparently, is to make sure everybody knows your book is as joyless as possible. You have to have a cover shot where you look gravely concerned and a title that suggests you are a lone and stalwart champion of weighty causes. Hillary Clinton's title, "Hard Choices," has all the uplift of a round chunk of lead, but for excessive gravitas I have to agree with the Washington Post reviewer David Ignatius that Leon Panetta's title — "Worthy Fights" — sets a new standard.
Gail: Well, he wasn't going to call it "Meaningless Battles." Although there are a lot of folks in Washington who could write that book.
David: It's odd because Panetta is the opposite of a ponderous guy. He's very warm, engaging and down to earth. And he was a great public servant.
Gail: Hmm. Before you go any further, tell me what you think makes a great public servant in our current, ungreat, era.
David: You may agree or disagree with him on issues, but he had a skill that seems entirely absent these days, the ability to actually move people to do things. It starts with a psychological perceptiveness, knowing what people need. It continues with a sort of practical creativity — coming up with angles, proposals and situations that will bring disparate people behind a common effort. It also involves the ability to arouse affections, to motivate people to take action on your behalf. It's amazingly rare.
Gail: You're right. And isn't it strange that people would go into politics without actually having those skills? Maybe it's because politics these days is less and less about knowing how to interact with folks and more about knowing how to use the media and raise money.
David: What do you think of Panetta's decision to publish a memoir while his administration is still in office? Bob Gates did it. Hillary did it. Now he has. I confess I disapprove. I do think there should be an unofficial rule. No memoirs until your president moves out. It's important to protect internal deliberations.
Gail: I agree. I'd give Hillary a bit of a pass, given the fact that she went into the job as the most famous woman in the world, a former presidential candidate and a very likely candidate of the future. President Obama knew what he was getting.
But you don't sign on to work in an administration and then go out and undermine the president while he's still in office. And that's what so many of them do. Leon Panetta goes on MSNBC promoting his book, and says: "Too often in my view the president relies on the logic of the law professor rather than the passion of a leader." That may be true, but it's not helping. Helping the administration's foreign policy, I mean. Obviously writing about a sitting president helps sales.
David: It's also striking to me that it's the foreign policy advisers that are happiest to dish on Obama. They are the ones who were most unhappy with what they saw as the president's passivity and indecision. Obama named activist, tough-minded people to the top foreign policy jobs, who came from a certain generation that took American interventionism for granted, but then pursued a policy inconsistent with their views.
Gail: I think he's been more of an interventionist than voters might have expected, given the way he first got into office. Think about the surge in Afghanistan, Libya, all those drones.
I would suggest that the reason Obama is getting so beaten up by memoirists on foreign policy is because the foreign policy hasn't worked. They aren't trying to correct history – they're trying to separate themselves from the failure. Which is another reason I agree with you about the unseemliness of publishing these memoirs while your old boss is still in office.
David: I think I'm developing an upstream, downstream view of public action. When the tide of history is going against you, when you are swimming upstream, then active interventionism is required. It's perfectly obvious the world is going to have to get more involved in Iraq and Syria. Even after the U.S.-led bombing campaign, ISIS is still taking over new towns, like, apparently the border town of Kobani. This war is going to get bigger before it gets smaller.
Gail: I still keep dropping back and wondering if we shouldn't leave this to the region. Let Iraq's neighbors worry about Iraq, and let Turkey worry about Kobani. I may be way off base. But we're having all these arguments about whether we should have soldiers fighting on the ground, and much less about whether these interventions ever work.
David: On the other hand, and on a happier note, I was delighted to see the Supreme Court take no action on those gay marriage cases. Here's an example of where the tide of history is clearly flowing downstream. Leadership in this circumstance just means getting out of the way. That takes fine judgment and humility.
Gail: I noticed that Senator Ted Cruz called the Supreme Court's decision to take no action "judicial activism at its worst." Still more proof that the best definition of judicial activism is: "any decision I don't like."
David: I can't help pointing out that this is exactly what the court did not do with Roe v. Wade. Instead of letting events take shape, the court arrogantly stopped debate and froze the two sides into extreme polarities. Such a bad decision, even from a pro-choice perspective. I suspect you disagree.
Gail: Give that man a cigar! You're right, David. I totally disagree.
If states had been left to their own devices over the last few decades, I doubt very much you'd have seen the legislatures in, say, Texas or Mississippi, gradually coming around. Today, instead of eight clinics operating in Texas, there'd be none. Women in Mississippi who now have to travel to Jackson would probably have to find their way to New York or California. That's not much of a problem for women with assets, but it's the end of all options for the poor.
Abortion is exactly the kind of issue that requires the Supreme Court's intervention. It involves a critical right; it's politically toxic in many parts of the country and as a practical matter it mainly has an impact on the poor.
David: In any case, my overall point is that it's always a mistake to trust people with dispositions that are permanent.
Gail: People who permanently have a disposition?
David: What I mean is that people who are always hyperactive will be terrible in certain circumstances and people who are always cautious will be terrible in others. The only people you can trust are those who let their means be governed by their circumstances.
Gail: I propose a different division – those who have really bad judgment and those who have really good judgment. The latter can be, well, judges. The former thrive on reality television. The rest of us will have to muddle along in the middle.
Maybe there's a book in this. I'll work up a proposal if you think up a title.
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