I've seen columnists become obsessed; I've seen them rage at or swoon over the objects of their obsessions. But nothing - not even my own supposed obsession with New York Times columnist David Brooks -- compares with his decade-long, love-hate fixation on the Ivy League, the "love" side of it on display in his column today celebrating an influx of Clinton Ivy Leaguers into the Obama administration.

The "hate" side surfaces and re-surfaces, too, though. In a gloating, 2001 Wall Street Journal essay, "Bush In, Ivy Out," Brooks ridiculed Clinton Ivy leaguers who were then being replaced by real Americans "from inland state schools" under two apostate Yalies, Bush and Cheney: "You couldn't have swung an ax in Bill Clinton's cabinet room without hitting a bunch of Ivy League grads," Brooks snarked, getting meaner from then on. To him and all conservative propagandists, they were all liberal elitists.

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"Larry Summers has weathered the storm. He will be president of Harvard for a very long time," a celebrity professor who runs a major center there told me in 2005, as the Harvard Corporation upheld Summers against faculty outraged by his ham-handedness.

Even after new revelations forced Summers' resignation, his defenders insisted he'd been martyred on the altar of political correctness by professorial mandarins who'd hyped up his gross manners, his dressing-down of the African-American scholar Cornel West, and his suggestion that some kind of bell curve favors men over women in the sciences.

But Summers endangered more than political correctness (some of which deserved what he gave it). Dean Baker has explained here better than I ever can how republics falter under Summers' kind of hyper-neo-liberalism. But let me say a bit more about what Barack Obama should know of Summers' civic liabilities before he considers making him Treasury Secretary, a post he held briefly under Bill Clinton.

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It's well known by now that Barack Obama learns from his mistakes and tries hard not to make them twice. So should those of us who supported him. Even here, on what we fancy is the right side of history, we can look at our own mistakes candidly in order to learn from them, painful though that may be.

My "we" is purely rhetorical and imperial, since my own performance as a commentator was flawless. But, seriously, folks: Obama has a lot to teach about managing anger and about how to subordinate righteous moralism to strategic generosity in order to win truly moral gains.

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Even as we lurch from symbolism to substance now that Barack Obama is President-elect, I hope that he appreciates the symbolic and substantive rewards of being sworn in on January 20 as "Barack Hussein Obama."

During the campaign, neo-conservatives such as Daniel Pipes and others of Obama's detractors thought it smart to highlight his paternal Muslim roots and associations. But now that he's won, you'd have to be as naive as a neo-con to miss the nobility and world-historical gains this country would achieve if, having overthrown a bad Hussein, it installed a good one -- not in Baghdad, but in Washington.

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Amid the euphoria last night in Chicago, one network's cameras zoomed in on an elderly black man who simply stood there weeping. Jesse Jackson wept quietly that way, too. So did I.

Everything in Barack Obama's bearing and speech showed he understood what we were feeling. Last night he shouldered the burdens of history and fatality with a gravitas and, I thought, a sadness reminiscent of Lincoln's.

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Polling places in New York City open at 6:00 am, and when I arrived at mine at 5:45 a.m. at least 600 people were on line, stretching from the school door near East 33rd Street and Third Avenue back to the end of the block on Second Avenue, and then down the avenue to 32nd Street. By the time I left after casting my vote, at 6:45 or so, it had grown light out, and there were at least another 600 people waiting on line.

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One Saturday morning in 1982 I walked into the Brooklyn Board of Elections and found 30 supporters of then-State Senator Vander Beatty "checking" voter registration cards from the recent primary election.

The hobgoblins of Florida, 2000, never outdid what I saw next that morning in Brooklyn. But, believe me, it can happen again. It was stopped in Brooklyn only thanks to an insider with a conscience.

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As the polls tighten, Slate's veteran blowhard press critic Jack Shafer surely knows that sensationalist journalism and racism are two of the biggest reasons. But, as Todd Gitlin notes here, Shafer is training his piercing gaze on liberals in the media, who, he complains, are so enraptured by Obama that they can't bear to acknowledge his faults and their inevitable disappointments if he wins.

Let me give this sage of journalism something he really deserves -- a viral e-mail. This one really stopped me. It will help Shafer and all of us, far more than his own commentary does, to tell whether liberal pundits' jitters are worth frothing about just now. Ask yourself these simple questions:

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Some people are still wondering whether Barack Obama will be flummoxed on Nov. 4 by the so-called "Bradley Effect." Maybe, maybe not, but that we're even debating it shows that much has changed for the better, as I note in a short commentary, "Things No One Talks About," in Dissent magazine.

What I don't talk about even there is that some of us were heralding this change even before we'd heard of Obama, way back when some of his biggest current backers were claiming that prospects like his could never materialize, and even that they shouldn't, because who needs a deracinated neo-liberal? The struggles behind his struggle can be quickly sketched, but they were hard-won, and worth knowing about.

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In 1994 I wrote that the left activist and sage Jim Chapin considered New York's then-new mayor Rudy Giuliani a "progressive conservative" like Teddy Roosevelt.

David Brooks, who worshipped Giuliani, picked up the phrase, and now he's claiming that it would have fit John McCain, too, if only McCain had "escaped the straightjacket of a party that is ailing and a conservatism that is behind the times." That he didn't escape makes his campaign "unspeakably sad."

Hello? The hero of Hanoi, imprisoned by his Republican base and his chosen running mate? What's unspeakably sad is how long ago McCain's leadership and Brooks' judgment went wrong -- a surprise only to journalists who still fall for Brooks as they once did for McCain.

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Neo-conservatives always try to join their Idealism to Power by riding the wrong horses.

They rode the Vietnam War; Richard Nixon; "freedom fighters" like Angola's Jonas Savimbi or Afghan's Mujahideen; Iran-Contra; anti-Communist dictators Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein -- recall Rumsfeld's handshake -- and the Argentine junta (because, you see, if Communism triumphed, as in the Eastern Bloc, it would never be defeated by its captives). Neo-cons rode Dan Quayle, Pat Robertson, and Dick Cheney.Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush themselves rode real horses, so neo-cons rode Reagan and Bush, too.

This year, they tried to ride Giuliani (I helped stop that one) before battening onto poor John McCain. Watching them climb off for now is as painful as watching Americans evacuating Saigon in 1975.

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In an e-mail message, the journalist Jack Hitt sums up what it has all come down to: McCain, especially at his most folksy and sincere, now delivers a perfect impersonation of Dana Carvey impersonating John McCain.

That is no small trick, my friends. To believe as deeply as McCain does that he is sincere at this point requires a truly bottomless capacity for self-delusion. And that makes neo-con Field Marshall Wilhelm von Kristol McCain's perfect handler, for Kristol now resembles Carvey impersonating an un-American subversive posing as a genial pundit named Bill Kristol.

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Barack Obama likened John McCain to George W. Bush. McCain pointed out that he is not George W. Bush and insisted it's important we learn the full truth about Obama's associations with a "washed up terrorist," starting with the untruth that Obama "launched his campaign" in the washed-up terrorist's living room. McCain thereupon likened Obama to Herbert Hoover.

Neither candidate acknowledged that to rescue the American dream and really vindicate the American people, corporate capitalism will have to be reconfigured substantially enough to cause enormous transitional dislocation and pain.

Even though I always thought that William F. Buckley, Jr. had a first-class temperament but a second-class intellect, and even though I know little of what his son Christopher has accomplished and/or written over the years at National Review, the magazine his father founded, I was somewhat surprised to learn of the reaction he got from its readers (and its editor, Rich Lowry) yesterday, after endorsing Obama on his website.

Not only can't young Buckley deserve the reaction he got; the conservative movement doesn't deserve it, either. Not all TPM readers will agree with me, but America needs a better conservatism than this. It certainly deserves a better conservative spokesman than David Brooks, who, as I've noted here, hasn't shown half of Buckley's character in this time of national crisis.

I wrote here yesterday that McCain and the Republicans are forcing smart conservative and neo-conservative Republicans like New York Times columnist David Brooks to choose between their intellectual/moral self-respect and their ideological and partisan loyalties.

William F. Buckley's son Christopher has endorsed Obama. So has Ed Koch. George Will, the National Review's Jonah Goldberg and even, heaven help us, neo-con scourge Charles Krauthammer have virtually endorsed him and have certainly written off McCain/Palin.

So, what did Brooks do this morning; what does it show us; and why does it matter?

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