Joe Biden is heaping praise on New York Times columnist David Brooks, talking up what the former vice president calls the writer’s insight into American political life.
At a Manhattan fundraiser Tuesday night Biden offered a reading list to paying guests, including the 2018 book How Democracies Die by Harvard professors Steven Levitzky and Daniel Ziblatt, in which the authors paint President Trump as a de facto authoritarian.
Biden then mentioned “a conservative writer you all know of or you may know, David Brooks.”
Biden added, “I think the guy writes pretty damn well about an awful lot of things.”
Brooks made his name as a conservative polemicist and reporter, working his way up through the Wall Street Journal and as a founding editor at the Weekly Standard. His work initially focused on electoral politics and current affairs, but his focus in recent years has been morality and ethics. Brooks’ most recent book is The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life.
But Brooks hasn’t completely forsaken politics. When several women came forward to accuse the former vice president of inappropriate touching, Brooks took to Twitter to defend Biden.
“When I started covering politics I was struck by how often politicians made physical contact with voters and journalists. It wasn’t about sex,” Brooks wrote on Twitter. “It was about connection. Joe Biden, who emerged in that era, is one of the finest people I’ve ever covered.”
That’s a long-held sentiment for Brooks. In 2008, even before Democratic nominee-in-waiting Barack Obama chose Biden as his running mate, Brooks was effusive in his praise of the Delaware senator for three-and-a-half decades.
“Democrats in general, and Obama in particular, have trouble connecting with working-class voters, especially Catholic ones. Biden would be the bridge,” Brooks wrote in an Aug. 22 column, “Hoping It’s Biden.”
