David Brooks on Bill Frist

Now I must be honest and admit that when I saw David Brooks had written a commentary on Bill Frist I was overjoyed. I anticipated another mindless, partisan column from the man I have regularly ripped to ribbons on these virtual pages. I was overjoyed because it was about Bill Frist who I have spent the last few days ripping to ribbons. I was disappointed. Instead I got a story from David Brooks about a Jekyl and Hyde transformation of a man that I don't think Brooks has much respect for anymore, Bill Frist.

For starters he admits that Frist was on the wrong side of the Schiavo debacle for the wrong reasons.

It's not quite fair to say that Frist diagnosed Schiavo from a TV screen, but he did put himself on the wrong side of the autopsy that came out last week. He did betray his medical training, which is the core of his being, to please a key constituency group.

And that Bill Frist is not the one that people remember before he entered the Senate.

And yet when I spent a week in Nashville a few years ago interviewing people who had known Frist, I found they all revered him. I came across story after story of Frist performing some act of personal kindness, ranging from saving lives in Africa to writing out a 40-page memo on the ecology and history of Nantucket for an acquaintance who was going to vacation there.

There were two things Frist was not: political and ideologically conservative. He barely voted before he ran for Senate. Tom Perdue, his first campaign manager, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Quite frankly, for the first three or four months I wasn't sure he was a Democrat or a Republican. I think I helped him become a Republican." That may be overstating things, but for his first years in the Senate, Frist seemed to fit the mold of the Tennessee Republican, the mold of Howard Baker and Lamar Alexander - conservative but pragmatic, energetic but not confrontational.

Now I don't know if the description of the other Bill Frist that Brooks gives us is accurate but I don't have any reason to believe it isn't. That's certainly not the Bill Frist that we see today.

Brooks is surprisingly perceptive when he discusses what happened to Frist.

But the Senate changes people. Senators are endlessly polished and briefed; they spend their days relentlessly speechifying. The White House beckons, and some come to seem less like human beings and more like nation-states. Opinions turn into positions. Beliefs grow more abstract. Individual traits become parts of the brand.

Read that again. Yes, it is from the pen of David Brooks. So Brooks has explained what happened to Bill Frist, now who's going to explain what happened to the real David Brooks.