It’s Not the Style. It’s the Smile.

David Brooks is so close to getting it right, he can almost taste it. Brooks notes that by a traditional economic analysis, Obama should be losing. The economy is bad. Public perception of the economy is bad. Public perception is that the economy is worse than it was four years ago. And people blame the president for that, at least to some extent.

Brooks credits Obama’s resilience on his “leadership style”. He invents a clever sounding narrative about the “ESPN Man”, as “postfeminist … hyperco...