The trouble is that you can't negotiate with the "little man who wasn't there"

A great segment with Mark Shields & David Brooks on the PBS NewsHour one pre-election Friday, which included these nuggets:

“JIM LEHRER: Remarkable time in our country, David?

DAVID BROOKS: It is. Even as the economic mood goes down, the political mood really does go up.

And I’m personally very excited about it, and excited about the day, but even excited about the mood that has already happened. I mean, Obama talks about changing the tone. He really has. Republican senators are saying they hear more from Obama than they did from Bush. He’s had conversations with conservatives, with liberals.

And he’s demonstrated he’s not a guy who is partisan.

Now, what I mean by that, with some people, when you disagree with them, you get the sense that it’s like a little status battle, that their side is a little better than your side.

And he has absolutely none of that, in part because he is so self-confident. But there’s no status. It’s not a cultural war. Like, with the Clintons, there was a little cultural war, with the Bushes. There was a little status. You know those Democrats, you know?

But, with him, there is absolutely none of that. And, therefore, disagreement doesn’t carry a lot of the emotional baggage that it might otherwise.

JIM LEHRER: What about the expectations saying — there’s already stories now, oh, the expectations are so high, there is no way in the world that the country cannot be anything but disappointed with Barack Obama, because the expectations are so high.

MARK SHIELDS: Boy, we will find an angle, won’t we?”