David Brooks: A "Conservative" Columnist Acceptable to the Left
Columbia Journalism Review's Megan Garber recently talked to Times' liberal columnist and former editorial page editor Gail Collins, whoconfirmed conservative suspicions about the hiring of Weekly Standard editor David Brooks as a columnist: He was a "conservative" acceptable to the left, one you could invite to dinner parties. 
And David Brooks - David and [Nicholas Kristof] I hired when I was editor; that was my major contribution to the editorial page, I think - David just has so many interests. He is just so smart, and he's also, for our purposes, the closest thing you can have to a Republican who liberal Democrats really love - or at least feel that if they had dinner with him, he would understand their point of view.
A month before the election Brooks called Gov. Sarah Palin a "fatal cancer" on the Republican party, as Tim Graham recounted at NewsBusters.Brooks also lauded Barack Obama recounting a conversation he had with Obama about the intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr: "I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say."
