All politics is (still) local (II)

New York Times columnist Gail Collins: “We have a dramatic saga story line brewing here, and I do not want to mess it up by pointing out that Obama’s party won the only two elections that actually had anything to do with the president’s agenda.”

Collins and Brooks on Obama

Not only do I like this exchange between New York Times columnists Gail Collins and David Brooks, but I like it more than many of their columns. It’s not blogging. It is a conversation — or “The Conversation,” as the Times labels it.

It’s not that they’re finally saying what they really mean — in fact, they’ve both made essentially the same points in their columns, especially Brooks. It’s that their exchange is loose and human in ways that their published work isn’t.

I hope “The Conversation” affects their column-writing.