Obama Heart David Brooks

DrudgeReport links to a 1996 interview in which Obama sounds very much like David Brooks:

"What concerns me the most are children and the way they are treated," he says about why he will pursue a career in public office. "As an African-American, I am very concerned about children from poor neighborhoods, the problems they deal with, the total lack of a stable environment to enable them to grow and develop. It depends a lot on the economy, the opportunities they are given, their own selves and their parents. It also depends on values, for instance on the kind of family values that get talked about a lot, especially by politicians."

He continues, saying, "values don’t just belong to individuals, they are also collective. Children are exposed to the values around them, and if they come to believe that the lives of their parents and their community cannot be rewarded, if their schools and homes are crumbling, how can they come to believe in their own values when they don’t have any to begin with? My priority is to return social values to public debate, because we are all one big family, transcending racial or class differences. We have obligations and responsibilities towards one another."

He says, "perhaps that’s where the private and public spheres meet, when it comes to couples, relationships, families or tribes. What’s important is empathy, an understanding of shared responsibilities, the ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes.

It is a standard part of the (neo-)conservative narrative that well-intentioned great society government programs (e.g.: welfare and integration) aimed at helping individuals wound up destroying communities -- homes and neighborhood schools -- and hurting the people they sought to help.

Obama appears, in this interview, to implicitly endorse, at least something close to this view.

Obama identifies empathy -- identifying, being fundamentally concerned, with the suffering of an-other -- as the solution to the breakdown of communities. A lack of empathy is the certainly, once he points it out, perhaps the most visible evidence of the dis-function of broken communities.

Obama leaves open what sort of policies he envisions to rebuild communal empathy. But it is clear that he understands the flawed nature of the knee-jerk great society liberal approach.