Decline Mongering

David Brooks has a really tough task ahead of him. His career depends on cheerleading for conservatives in 2012 to an audience who understands the poverty of their arguments. If you're going to get voters who can add excited about the Republican party, you've got to make the situation look bleak enough to distract voters from the actual plans, personalities, and platform of the Republican party.

Brooks prefaces his pundiry for the remainder of the 2012 election cyle with an simple declaration of his theme. Here is the template that David Brooks will be reusing ad nauseum:

I’ll be writing a lot about the presidential election over the next 16 months, but at the outset I would just like to remark that I’m opining on this whole campaign under protest. I’m registering a protest because for someone of my Hamiltonian/National Greatness perspective, the two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic. Their programs are unusually unimaginative. Their policies are unusually incommensurate to the problem at hand.

Of course, any policy wonk (or man-on-the-street with a calculator) would say that Ryan's Folly and the Pawlenty Tax-a-palooza are probably too imaginative with their accounting, this will certainly be Brooks' theme. I'd like to call attention to the art of decline mongering, however. What tells Brooks that the situation is bleak as can be?