Brooks on Clinton

I've always regarded David Brooks as the least obnoxious conservative when it comes to the topic of Hillary Clinton, but maybe it's just because he obscures his criticisms of her behind a thick veil of obsequiousness. Here's his lede today:

I’m not a Hillary-hater. She’s been an outstanding senator. She hung tough on Iraq through the dark days of 2005. In this campaign, she has soldiered on bravely even though she has most of the elected Democrats, news media and the educated class rooting against her.

Nice, right? But then he goes on to recount the fact that, yes, she burned many bridges during the '94 health reform debacle. One of those bridges was to Rep. Jim Cooper (a right-Democrat from Tennessee for whom I have a great amount of sympathy) who now, unsurprisingly, supports Barack Obama. Back in '94, Cooper opposed Hillary's reform plan and introduced a less ambitious one of his own. Along the way, they fell out with each other and Hillary, it turns out, wasn't all that nice to him.

Brooks tells this story by way of saying

Cooper is, of course, a man who has been burned in the past. But it is legitimate to wonder if adults can really change all that much. A defter politician would have reached out to Cooper and made an attempt to address the concerns he represents.

Which is perhaps the most vacuous political observation I've read in a very long time. In fact, the lessons both Clinton and Cooper learned in '94 look, at least to me, fairly evident in their political evolutions since then. Back then, Clinton may have had the wrong demeanor, but she backed the right policy. Jim Cooper was her foil. Fourteen years later, Hillary seems to have learned at least a little bit about political wheeling and dealing. And Jim Cooper? Why, he's a cosponsor of a universal health care bill of his own.