In his column today, David Brooks cleverly sketched out the zeitgeists of the Clinton and Obama campaigns. In short, she's Old Politics, rooted in the executive mindset that values expertise and thinks leadership means issuing orders. His New Politics, on the other hand, draws power from collaboration and the flattening of status.

I know that by offering anything resembling a defense of the fuddy-duddy Clintonian approach, I run the risk of marking myself as thoroughly uncool and quite possible having an authoritarian streak. Ah well -- I offer, along with my reputation, a few potential soft spots in the thinking that "new politics" is altogether different from or better than the politics of yore.

First, it's plain crazy to suggest that Obama disdains experts in the way that conservatives do. It's just that his experts -- like Samantha Power on foreign policy and Austan Goolsbee on economics -- are somewhat hipper than most. And some of that patina comes from the fact that they're too young to have had the experience of serving a president (yet).

Second, the networked era isn't itself always blow-the-doors-open collaborative. Take Wikipedia, what we sometimes celebrate as the very embodiment of wisdom-of-crowds thinking. By Jimmy Wales' own admission, it's largely written by a small group of committed volunteers. Still remarkable, just not quite what its pop culture reputation would have it be.

Third, one of the things that has powered the Web 2.0 revolution is that everything is so cheap and easy that there's not much downside to failing again and again. Of course, the same can't be said for governing the world's remaining superpower. So in some sense it can sometimes feel like we're comparing apples and fireplaces here.