I don’t associate happy feelings with the pink tie and shirt, valiant comb-over, and confused half-smile that pops up when I’m reading a David Brooks NYT op-ed. He positions himself as a holier-than-everyone dead-center moderate, but I have a hunch that he’s a simple conservative in times when that category is less embarrassing.

Today Brooks is reminding everyone how horribly depressing it is that all our politicians are filthy rich. He draws dynastic equivalence between Pelosi and Bush with a bunch of cute metaphors. (I’m chuckling that New Yorkers are expected to know the Atlanta neighborhood, or whatever it is, called Buckhead.) Yes, wealthy politicians are depressing, but I’m not sure about this bit:

It is not a surprise, as The Washington Post reported this week, that despite campaign promises about changing the tone in Washington, Pelosi has decided to exclude Republicans from the first burst of legislation—to forbid them to offer amendments or alternatives.

That phrase “changing the tone,” it rings a bell. Where have we heard that before? Oh, yes, about two thousand times during the 2000 elections. From Bush. Remember that? It was one of his—whatchamacallit—catch phrases. Like, here, during a debate with Gore:

When Al Gore, seeking G.O.P. specifics to denounce, went so far as to suggest it was “kind of put up or shut up time,” George W. Bush put on a hurt look and went into whining mode. “That doesn’t sound very presidential to me. … We have to do something to change the tone of the discourse.” He later added reverently that “politics doesn’t have to be ugly and mean.”

It was the big, cynical joke of Bush’s first term that he had promised all this gay tone-changing, didn’t even win the popular vote, but immediately after seizing power became a devil-may-care Republican band leader. Either he’s a big fat liar, or to him tone-changing means shutting-up and voting his way. (And I apologize if I offended anyone with that un-presidential “shut-up.”)

Four disastrous years later in 2004, it didn’t make much sense (even to swing/retarded voters) for Bush to campaign on changing a tone that he’d established himself. So we didn’t hear much about it then, and I don’t recall Democratic candidates of this past mid-term election reaching into the ol’ 2000 campaign rhetoric closet to “change the tone” like mad once they took over—do you?

Instead it was a raucous campaign where we libs were salivating at the possibility of fixing some things that’d been broken over the past six years. Once it became clear that winning was a possibility (what a strange, unfamiliar feeling), Dems assured everyone that they didn’t intend to burn down the House.

But they didn’t promise to “change the tone,” Brooks. Not any more than they promised to put social security funds in a “lockbox.”