After a witty introduction by Rhodes College’s Dr. Dan Cullen, New York Times columnist and author David Brooks quipped that he’d agreed to speak here during this busy presidential campaign year as long as the introduction wasn’t funnier than his own speech.

He needn’t have worried.

Brooks had spoken at Rhodes before, back in 2000, when he was touting his first bestseller, “Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.”

A University of Chicago history grad, Brooks coined the term “bobo” as a contraction of “bohemian” and “bourgeois,” signifying how the cultural descendants of the yuppies had acquired a patina of faux outdoorsy, casual, peasant authenticity as they simultaneously scaled the economic heights via their new economy careers.

Rather than buying expensive furs or cars, as the yuppies of the 1980s would, bobos bought “working” farms in gentrified rural areas and acquired the most expensive versions of common items (think Viking good, Kenmore bad).

“It’s pretty much true that visiting Rhodes in 2000 was pretty much the turning point in my life,” said Brooks, grinning at the audience packed into the Bryan Campus Life Center’s McCallum Hall on April 1.

Brooks joined the New York Times’ stable of columnists in September 2003, after helping establish The Weekly Standard and covering the fall of the Soviet Union for The Wall Street Journal.

Born into a liberal Jewish family in Toronto and raised in New York, Brooks swung to the right after college, which made his posting at the “Old Gray Lady” on Times Square seem “like raising the Jolly Roger,” according to his introducer, Dr. Dan Cullen, Rhodes College associate political science professor.

Brooks said, “It’s like being chief rabbi in Mecca.”

Brooks is now working on a third tome in a field some have called “comic sociology.” He calls this book “How Success Happens.”

“It’s about why some people succeed,” Brooks said. “It’s part neuroscience, part sociology.”

With this behavioral science background, Brooks offered this view of politicians in general:

“They’re all emotional freaks. They have a fear of being alone. They have extremely large heads. They’re extremely touchy-feely. I once saw Ted Kennedy and Dan Quayle discussing something on the floor of the Senate, and they were laughing and hugging, and you just wanted to say, ‘Get a room!’”

The columnist offered the following thoughts on the three leading presidential candidates:

On John McCain: “I confess: I love the guy. … I know he would never lie to me. His most outstanding quality is his moral sensibility. If somebody does something dishonorable, he will go after them. … “He is averse to organization. He feels any organization as assaults on himself. It was true in the Navy, it was true in prison, and it was true in the Senate.”

“He enjoys conflict. McCain is not shy about telling you he disagrees with you. He prefers it.”

On Hillary Clinton: “When you come to here, you immediately see the intellect. She is well-respected as a senator. I once went with a bunch to senators to Europe, and they all came to a hotel, and when Sen. Clinton arrived, it was like Elizabeth Taylor had arrived. … She has been a tremendous senator. Her weakness is trust. She doesn’t trust. … Her staff is very small, very private, very closed people who, to be honest, aren’t the most pleasant people on earth.”

On Barack Obama: “He is tremendously perceptive about people. … He generally sees things as a community organizer. I think he tends to be somewhat moderate, but he has a terribly nuanced view on every issue. One time we were talking, and the interview wasn’t going anywhere, and I asked him, ‘Did you ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?’ He proceeded to give me a lecture on Niebuhr’s book, ‘The Irony of American History.’ It’s a level of intellectual seriousness that is tremendously impressive. The downside is that he has confidence that equals or surpasses that of President Bush.”

Brooks’ stated topic was “What the 2008 election says about the American people.”

He said conservatism’s heyday is waning, but that won’t necessarily mean a swing toward liberal values.

He noted as “somehow fitting” the Feb. 27 death of William F. Buckley Jr., considered by many to be the leader of the conservative movement that grew out of the 1960s into power in the 1980s through 2006.

“The Republican Party has aged 10 years in the last three,” Brooks said. “It’s not because Republicans are getting older faster, it’s because they’re not getting young people.”

In the early 1980s, conservative groups talked about ideas, the limits of human knowledge and the dangers of social planning, Brooks said. In contrast, conservatives in power in the mid 1990s and after were “spending money to by votes.”

“In 1994, there were about 4,000 earmarks,” Brooks said. “Ten years later, there were 14,000. Today, it’s about 28,000. They used to say there were a lot of oddballs on K Street. By the time Tom Delay left office, there were a lot more sleazeballs.

“Conservatives and liberals were people with ideas; Republicans and Democrats were people who would sell you out. We used to have George Gilder, Allan Bloom and ‘The Closing of the American Mind.’ Now, we have blogs and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity.”