Perhaps you are like me and have found, over the Bush-ravaged years of 2001 to the present, consolation in the wise and steady analysis of Paul Krugman, resident economics columnist on the op-ed pages of the New York Times. He was among the first to suggest that the Iraq fiasco would be ruinously expensive and that the financial course BushCo had charted for the country was unsustainable. He has been right far more than he has ever been wrong. When it seemed that Bush's power was invincible, Krugman was confident that, in fact, Bush and his administration did not know what they were doing and that a helluva mess was being created that would require "adults," at some later point, to clean up. If anything, the conjoined crises of financial meltdown, oil shortage and unaffordability, and runaway federal budget and trade balance deficits are worse than Krugman predicted. I think the question now is not whether serious remedial action is required of "adults" who succeed Bush, but whether even such wiser heads are going to have the resources to deal with what may become a chronic, structural recession.
At some point, however, around the time that Ben Bernanke was appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Krugman began pulling his punches. I thought perhaps it had something to do with collegial courtesy; Bernanke, like Krugman, is on the economics faculty at Princeton, and maybe Krugman realized that his "wilder" utterances might come in for enhanced scrutiny by readers who in fact are the ones setting the policies that he criticizes. He wrote a column a while back in which he lauded Bernanke's bailout of Bear Stearns and suggested that the American economy had "dodged a bullet," holding out the hope that all of our problems with a deflating housing market, $130+ barrels of oil, rising unemployment, runaway real inflation, growing unemployment, dwindling consumer spending, collapse of the commercial airlines sector (as their very "business model" has been called into question by the cost of jet fuel), the struggling independent trucking industry -- all this could be handled with a little interest rate jiggering and other legerdemain by his Princeton colleague.
Krugman has also in not very subtle ways indicated his ardent support for Hillary Clinton. This became noticeable in a series of crushingly boring dissections of the two health care plans of Obama and Clinton. Krugman couched his criticism in terms of what is apparently to him a self-evident truth: that the content of the platform of a candidate is a reliable guide to his later style of governing. This strikes me as nuts; George W. Bush ran on a platform of a "humble foreign policy" in which "nation-building" was anathema to the interests of the USA. Since taking office, Bush has done little else except meddle in Middle Eastern and Afghan affairs.
My own take is that Krugman simply used his analysis of these boilerplate formalisms from the two candidates as a means to signal his support for Hillary Clinton in an "objective" fashion. Lately, however, he has been less subtle. For example, from the column of May 26:
"So what should Mr. Obama and his supporters do? Most immediately, they should realize that the continuing demonization of Mrs. Clinton serves nobody except Mr. McCain. One more trumped-up scandal won’t persuade the millions of voters who stuck with Mrs. Clinton despite incessant attacks on her character that she really was evil all along. But it might incline a few more of them to stay home in November."
This was Krugman's handling of Clinton's "RFK assassination" gaffe. What's strange about the solution Krugman prescribes is that he places the onus on Obama's supporters to remedy the problem of Hillary Clinton's habit of extraordinarily divisive and, at times, borderline crazy public statements. She's the one who made up, out of whole cloth, the lie about being shot at in Bosnia. In what sense is that "trumped up?" It's not a scandal; it's a strong indication of a reality deficit. Ditto her miraculous intercession in the Irish peace talks. Her "phone call at 3 am ad" was a home invasion scenario. The literal-minded can play games with the imagery all they want, and simply treat the story line of a lone mother at home with children, including her vulnerable, pretty teenage daughter, as coincidentally suggestive of a crime scene but really a stand-in for the general fear of "terrorist" attacks, even though this tableau makes absolutely no sense in terms of terrorist threats. And if you want to buy into Krugman's analysis, go ahead and agree with him that the "RFK assassination" reference was just to help us remember that campaigns sometimes last into June.
So: maybe Krugman received an indication at some point, like other liberal academics (Robert Reich, for prominent example), that the Clinton Dynasty might find a place for him in their new Administration. I don't know; that's speculation. He might welcome the change. For he's a terrible writer. It's painful to read an entire column in which 95% of all sentences begin with conjunctions or prepositions. I've thought of writing an entire blog piece as a parody of his style. And maybe I will someday. If I feel like it. Because that's what you can do with a blog. And no one will stop you. But then no one is likely to hire you in their administration. Because you're a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Yet maintaining your integrity. And not suggesting to people that their problems with Hillary Clinton are just something they made up.
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