Can you address the work of the relatively new conservative columnists, David Brooks and John Tierney?
Brooks clearly lines up on the conservative side, but like Safire, he’s a libertarian conservative, not an evangelical Christian. On First Amendment issues and a variety of other social issues, both Safire and Brooks, for instance, came out literally in favor of either gay marriage or civil union. I think Tierney is also more libertarian than he is conservative in the conventional sense. Tierney is an oppositionist. He’s a contrarian. And particularly in the atmosphere of the Times, I think he’s made a very fine career out of being contrarian. He will write pieces that try to establish why automobile culture is good, why recycling is bad. He picked up Freakanomics for his first or second column because of that contrarian streak. Is he an ideological conservative? I don’t know. I knew him before I came to the Times and I know he’s a contrarian. A gadfly? In the context of that editorial page and that Op-Ed page and the general tone of the newspaper, I think that’s an important role to p
