Selling Out

David Brooks has a morality play of a column on Senate Majority Leader Dr. Bill Frist today. The theme is "earnest do-gooder goes to the Senate and loses his soul." Brooks likes the first Dr. Frist
Frist's motto in his high school yearbook was, "But I don't like to rest." He excelled at everything and noted, "Not surprisingly, with the family emphasis on self-worth, I longed to be first in everything, to be king of the hill, the grammar school capo di capo. I imagine I was quite insufferable."

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.
But life in the DC snakepit takes its toll:
Frist too appears to have been gradually altered. Many who've known him say it's hard to square the current on-message leader with the honest young man of "Transplant," the stiff, ideological politician with the beloved community leader who made such a mark on Nashville.
The Terry Shiavo fiasco was the tragic climax:
These days he seems not so much the leader of the Senate conservatives, but someone who is playing the role. And because he is behaving in ways that don't seem entirely authentic, he is often trying just a bit too hard, striking the notes more forcefully than they need to be struck.

That is what happened during the Terri Schiavo affair. 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.

It's a sad story, and it's told well. This column doesn't feel like a politically orered hit - it seems more genuine than most of Brooks.

But even if it turns out that Rove or some other Bush capo had Brooks push the button on Frist, you can't help but admire the technique.

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