What, exactly, are the "major issues of the day," Mr. Brooks?

This is the kind of thing that NY Times token "conservative" David Brooks does that makes so many conservatives detest him. From a conversation - a lament about how much better conservatives used to be - with Judy Woodruff and Mark Shields on PBS’s “NewsHour:"

“I went back. I said, ‘Am I imagining the way old campaigns used to be?’” Brooks said. “I went back and looked at some of the 1980 speeches, or the debates, Jimmy Carter versus Ronald Reagan. They actually were talking about the major issues of the day, the Soviet Union, and inflation and stagflation. If you look at the major issues of the day, well, widening inequality — well, that has not really been talked about. Wage stagnation that has barely been talked about, global warming — you go down the list of the big issues of the day, and this campaign I think more even than real-life campaigns, it’s not imagining some campaign, even more than recent campaigns, has ignored a lot of those issues.”

If you want to make the case that President Birth Control-Big Bird-Binders-and-Bayonets has neglected the "major issues of the day," well, yeah. That's true. But if you want to make the case that global warming is one of the major issues of the day, I suspect that you'd find a lot of dissenters. As to anything economic in nature - including "widening inequality" and "wage stagnation," well, those are a function of the sad state of the American economy. They are completely inseparable from discussion of the unemployment rate, the deficit, the debt, the tax code, the looming entitlement crisis - you know, all of the things that Mitt Romney has been talking about every day for the past year.

Has one of the campaigns "ignored a lot of" the major issues of the day? Sure. But they haven't both ignored them. This is the kind of false equivalence that's infuriating. And it's the kind of thing that tells conservatives that David Brooks is not one of them...