Serendipity, Facebook-style

The following two items turned up back-to-back in my Facebook news feed yesterday:

First, Paul Krugman called the fashionable obsession with long-term budget deficits a "cop-out," since it lets budget scolds off the hook for dealing with America's here-and-now problems like our crumbling infrastructure, rising economic inequality, and jobless "recovery." In fact, it paints the people who want to address those problems as the villains.

Think about it: Faced with mass unemployment and the enormous waste it entails, for years the Beltway elite devoted almost all their energy not to promoting recovery, but to Bowles-Simpsonism — to devising “grand bargains” that would address the supposedly urgent problem of how we’ll pay for Social Security and Medicare a couple of decades from now. [...]

Discussions of short-run fiscal and monetary policy are politically charged. Oppose austerity and support monetary expansion and you’ll be lambasted by the right; do the reverse and you’ll be criticized and maybe ridiculed by the left. I understand why it’s tempting to dismiss the whole debate and declare that the really important issues involve the long run. But while people who say that kind of thing like to pose as brave and responsible, they’re actually ducking the hard stuff — which is to say, being craven and irresponsible.

Which brings me back to the president’s new budget.

It goes without saying that Mr. Obama’s fiscal proposals, like everything he does, will be attacked by Republicans. He’s also, however, sure to face criticism from self-proclaimed centrists accusing him of irresponsibly abandoning the fight against long-term budget deficits.

And immediately below it on the same feed was this cartoon by Gary Varvel, editorial cartoonist for the Indianapolis Star, crediting the economy-crippling sequestration cuts (talk about a cop-out!) for what recovery we're seeing right now, while blaming Obama for seeking ignoring long-term deficit issues to tackle the problems on his plate (and that of the Republican-controlled Congress) right now. You couldn't have measured that gap with an egg-timer.

The IndyStar's editorial board are no friends of Obama, although they did hang Varvel himself out to dry for a Thanksgiving season cartoon on Obama's immigration policy initiative that was generally considered to have crossed a line (although not for opposing Obama's policy in itself). And, amazingly, they keep that scourge of the liberal media, Mallard Filmore, going on the comics page.

Good news everyone: Three reasons to appreciate Krugman, all in one NYT column

Yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote this:

Am I saying that the professional consensus is always right? No. But when politicians pick and choose which experts — or, in many cases, “experts” — to believe, the odds are that they will choose badly. Moreover, experience shows that there is no accountability in such matters. Bear in mind that the American right is still taking its economic advice mainly from people who have spent many years wrongly predicting runaway inflation and a collapsing dollar.

All of which raises a troubling question: Are we as societies even capable of taking good policy advice?

First, I believe he's absolutely right on the merits. Bad economic advice has been running the game in America and Europe for years, and its exponents have paid no price for it. With the blessing of the University of Chicago Friedmanites, the encouragement of right-wing and centrist think tanks, and the self-righteous follow-through of all the Very Important People, superstition has become nearly-indisputable truth. Despite all the evidence.

Second, the use of those quote marks around "experts" is delightfully elegant.

Finally, he didn't write All of which begs the question; he wrote All of which raises a troubling question. First, this reminds readers that Krugman knows what "begging the question" actually means, which too many intellectually lazy commentators don't. And second, it shows why eschewing "begging the question" – even if it meant what mistaken writers suppose it means – which it doesn't – makes for better writing. The usual misunderstanding of "begs the question" supposes it to mean "raises the obvious question," as if it's simply a matter of vaguely-logical sequentiality. Krugman knows that the question raised by the superstition of austerity is not some matter of this-after-that. It's a question – a point of debate – that ought to leave us troubled that it's even on the table.

Seriously. Are we able, in this age of fashionable anti-science and anti-intellectualism, to take sound advice for the common good?

Quote of the day: Beautiful

In the intellectual synthesis of of contemporary ultra-conservatism, the impulses of Protestant asceticism can thus be drawn upon to support business self-interest and the beautiful mathematical models of neo-classical economists. (p. 82.)

- Richard Hofstadter, in 1965 – yes, in 1965 -- explaining why austerity economics was discredited before most p3 readers were born, and why Paul Krugman should be allowed to sleep in an extra half-hour tomorrow.

Quote of the day: The myth of the American “center”

Paul Krugman explains why few will mourn -- and still fewer even notice -- the passing of “Americans Elect:"

So why Americans Elect? Because there exists in America a small class of professional centrists, whose stock in trade is denouncing the extremists in both parties and calling for a middle ground. And this class cannot, as a professional matter, admit that there already is a centrist party in America, the Democrats — that the extremism they decry is all coming from one side of the political fence. Because if they admitted that, they’d just be moderate Democrats, with no holier-than-thou pedestal to stand on.

Amazing to think there's an elite living to be made pretending that the Republican party hasn't gone completely off the rails, but there we are.

Saturday morning tunes: A thousand people in the street

Today's tune is dedicated to #OccupyWallStreet and Occupy Portland.

The Buffalo Springfield's 1967 song sounds eerily prescient today. After all, look at what we've got:

Young people speakin' their minds, gettin' so much resistance from behind? Check.

A field day for the heat? Check.

And so on.

Paul Krugman began his most recent NYTimes column with these words:

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.

When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever.

It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.

What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.

If you're reading this in FB Notes, you'll need to click View Original Post to see the video.

Bad metaphors make bad economic policy: Part 2

(Updated below.) 

Remember: If you don't think about language, it will do your thinking for you.

Krugman today argues that the administration's newest buzzword, competitiveness, might be good politics but signals poor economic policy.

Along the way, he neatly disposes of the argument-by-metaphor that America (and, by extension, all large entities, including universities, hospitals, you name it) should be thought of as being like a corporation -- and hence run that way:

But isn’t it at least somewhat useful to think of our nation as if it were America Inc., competing in the global marketplace? No.

Consider: A corporate leader who increases profits by slashing his work force is thought to be successful. Well, that’s more or less what has happened in America recently: employment is way down, but profits are hitting new records. Who, exactly, considers this economic success?

Well, actually, to defeat the purpose of a rhetorical question by answering it, the tiny sliver of the population making out like bandits off those profits think it's really pretty amazingly great. Which ought to tell us a lot about who's got the most invested in this lame metaphor.

(Part 1 of "Bad metaphors make bad economic policy" is here.)

Update: Robert Reich says pretty much the same thing about "competitiveness" (emphasis added):

Word has it that the President will be emphasizing “improving American competitiveness” in his State of the Union Address Tuesday night. As I’ve noted, the term is meaningless — but it’s politically useful. CEOs and many conservatives think it means improving the profitability of American companies. Liberals and labor unions think it means increasing export jobs.

Neither touches at the heart of the matter.

Quote of the day: "Get your insults right"

Paul Krugman in a note to commenters on his blog:

Get your insults right. There is, I believe, a fair bit of evidence against the hypothesis that I’m stupid. What you mean to say is that I’m evil.

Like a snake swallowing a Buick

Okay, I'd love to tell you I'm far too cool to post about this, but . . . no, I'm not.

I was not online much this week and so I only today discovered that Krugman -- yes, that Krugman, the Shrill One -- linked to a 2005 post of mine from his NYTimes blog on Tuesday. The consequences for my meager traffic flow were pretty startling. The consequences for comments on my blog were about the same as always.

A very gratifying experience, except for the thought that I might have peaked five years ago without realizing it.

I was angrier, more earnest, and more into my old precincts of language and politics in the first year of this blog.  Now I'm just more irritated.

Separated at Birth: Krugman joins the search

[Update: So does Mannion. See addendum below.]

There are those who search for the Grail. There are those who search for the lost Ark of the Covenant. Others pursue the Missing Link, the True Cross, the Comedy of Aristotle, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, moderate Republicans, or Yeti.

And my cousin Tom has this uncanny ability to look down and spot four-leaf clovers.

Here at p3, we proudly welcome Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman to the confraternity of seekers after that rarest of rarities: Public figures who, hitherto unlinked, are actually Separated at Birth.

Today, Krugman identifies the SAB link between someone who has mixed feelings about the Volcker Rule and someone who's a strict follower of the Rules of Acquisition.

We're proud to have him on the team.

Addendum: Lance Mannion found another SAB angle in this story. Both Lance's and Krugman's (Note to Lance -- update your resume: "Got mentioned in same sentence with Paul Krugman!") proffered SAB links share an important connection: Wallace Shawn (linked by LM) played The Grand Nagus Zek, leader of the Ferengi government, who was also an occasional collaborator with and political patron of Armin Shimerman's Quark (linked by PK) on "Star Trek: Deep Space 9." I don't know what it means, but it's got to mean something.

Doesn't it?

The Krugman Blues

Talk about the ideal meeting of the artist and the material. There wasn't a chance in hell I could wait until Saturday for this:

Hat-tip to Susan H.

Reading the aura

Interesting:

In his blog today, Paul Krugman says he thinks the "aura of inevitability" (if not the fact of it) seems to be settling on health care reform--that a psychological shift in the discourse now assumes that some kind of reform will actually happen.

And last night Newt Gingrich was on Fox News talking about health care reform---but not about defeating it this session. Instead he's now saying that "the number one campaign issue in 2010 and 2012 is going to be repeal the [health care reform] bill."

Shifting "aura," indeed.

I'm still an agnostic on whether health care reform (including a robust public option) will actually pass or not. And any opinion advanced by Gingrich (who, in twenty years, has only said one genuinely smart thing that I'm aware of) certainly isn't going to make me rethink that.

But it does seem striking that Gingrich sounds like he's suddenly retrenching in anticipation of something called "health care reform" passing this session. It's not so much the possibility that he might be right (i.e., the fact), but simply the idea that he'd publicly admit the possibility (i.e., the aura).

Thought experiment

Paul Krugman made a startling confession yesterday:

[S]urveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Nixon.

No, I haven't lost my mind. Nixon was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch.

But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren't as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system's ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.

Krugman's just making a point, of course: Ted Kennedy's often-discussed "lost chance" for health care reform during the Nixon administration came at a point when government still worked. Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich were still just kids. Dick Cheney was just a Deputy Assistant to the president, with nothing like the unconstitutional power he would grab for thirty years later (although he was already experimenting with ways to use the Justice Department to harass political enemies).

In short, Krugman's point isn't that he misses Nixon ("surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch"); he misses a time when American government wasn't wrecked.

An interesting question would be: What would Nixon do if he were president today, with all the tools he'd have at his disposal today: His own TV network (Fox News), adversarial journalism at the national level a thing of the past, black sites, signing statements, legal domestic surveillance, the Senate broken, the Republican Party in the hands of right-wingers who don't believe in government, and the notion of bipartisanship (as anything other than a cynical joke) completely gone.

In other words, what if Nixon were in power today, when everything that checked his power and led to his undoing in 1974 has been removed?

The unforgiving minute

What Paul Krugman said:

President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.

This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.

The goal of government-can't-help conservatives is simply to deny Obama the possibility of any legislative accomplishment, no matter how much the country might need it. The tools they have to achieve this end include the remains of the Republican Party apparatus, a slice of voters who have been activated by fear and anger in a way that enlightened self-interest has failed to do, and a mainstream political media willing to call Al Gore a liar when he wasn't, but unwilling to call Sarah Palin and Chuck Grassley liars when they are.

Obama may soon be presented with these options, listed here in order of increasing likelihood that he'll be a one-term president:

1. Ignore Congressional Republicans and push through something that actually deserves to be called "health care reform."

2. Continue to chase the ghost of bipartisan compromise and pass something Democrats can call "reform" but which will do little or nothing to fix spiraling costs, the absence of dependable coverage for many Americans, and the worst of insurance company practices.

3. Fail to get even fig leaf legislation passed through Congress.

Wonder which option he'll go for. It's scary that, even at this late date, the answer isn't clear.

Minute's up.

Reading: Paul Krugman on the (in)ability to deal with the economy responsibly

Sometimes it only takes a word or two to let you know that, if you hadn't already realized that things are going badly, you should realize it now: When you hear a thoracic surgeon say "uh-oh," for example, or when you hear a newly-licensed teen driver tell his buddies, "Watch this."

Or when you hear Paul Krugman describe himself as "rattled."

On Friday I shared my worry that Oregon, influenced by political trends that began in California some years ago and gradually crept northward, could find responding to the current economic troubles a more difficult task than it might otherwise.

Citing an observation by Charlie Pierce, I wrote:

[T]he ongoing mess that our neighbors to the south have been facing for years isn't just a side effect of knee-jerk opposition to taxes and abuse of the initiative system on the structure of government--it's that knee-jerk opposition to taxes and abuse of the initiative system have become the structure of government.

Now comes Paul Krugman to tell me that, if I've erred, it could be that I'm not worried enough:

Despite the economic slump, despite irresponsible policies that have doubled the state’s debt burden since Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, California has immense human and financial resources. It should not be in fiscal crisis; it should not be on the verge of cutting essential public services and denying health coverage to almost a million children. But it is — and you have to wonder if California’s political paralysis foreshadows the future of the nation as a whole.

The seeds of California’s current crisis were planted more than 30 years ago, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, a ballot measure that placed the state’s budget in a straitjacket. Property tax rates were capped, and homeowners were shielded from increases in their tax assessments even as the value of their homes rose.

The result was a tax system that is both inequitable and unstable. […]

Even more important, however, Proposition 13 made it extremely hard to raise taxes, even in emergencies: no state tax rate may be increased without a two-thirds majority in both houses of the State Legislature. And this provision has interacted disastrously with state political trends.

For California, where the Republicans began their transformation from the party of Eisenhower to the party of Reagan, is also the place where they began their next transformation, into the party of Rush Limbaugh.

The result is a state--whose economy ranks below only a handful of nations in the world--that may simply be unable to take any responsible action to head off fiscal meltdown.

But surely political dysfunction on the scale Krugman sees in California can't spread to the nation as a whole, right? At least you'd think so. But that's where Krugman confesses to getting a little rattled:

America’s projected deficits may sound large, yet it would take only a modest tax increase to cover the expected rise in interest payments — and right now American taxes are well below those in most other wealthy countries. The fiscal consequences of the current crisis, in other words, should be manageable.

But that presumes that we’ll be able, as a political matter, to act responsibly. The example of California shows that this is by no means guaranteed. And the political problems that have plagued California for years are now increasingly apparent at a national level.

To be blunt: recent events suggest that the Republican Party has been driven mad by lack of power. […]

And that party still has 40 senators.

Fortunately for Oregon--at the moment--Democrats have a supermajority in both chambers. Not that Democrats are perfect. But if nothing else they're an effective brake on a minority party who, if they haven't yet begun barking at the moon like their colleagues at the national level, don't seem to be re-thinking any of their dysfunctional assumptions, either.

Krugman's article is going in the Readings list on the sidebar.

Reading: Krugman: Defending the Constitution is not an oath to be honored only when it's convenient

Paul Krugman takes time off from trying to head off global economic collapse to talk about something even more important: The consequences--if any--of abuse of power at the highest levels of our government.

The two are connected, after all.

[I]f we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly, that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses involved using the power of government to reward political friends and punish political enemies. […]

By my count, at least six important government agencies experienced major scandals over the past eight years — in most cases, scandals that were never properly investigated. And then there was the biggest scandal of all: Does anyone seriously doubt that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into invading Iraq?

Why, then, shouldn’t we have an official inquiry into abuses during the Bush years?

One answer you hear is that pursuing the truth would be divisive, that it would exacerbate partisanship. But if partisanship is so terrible, shouldn’t there be some penalty for the Bush administration’s politicization of every aspect of government?

Alternatively, we’re told that we don’t have to dwell on past abuses, because we won’t repeat them. But no important figure in the Bush administration, or among that administration’s political allies, has expressed remorse for breaking the law. What makes anyone think that they or their political heirs won’t do it all over again, given the chance?

Indeed. And it's an old rule of logic that the simplest proof that something is possible is to show that it's already happened:

In fact, we’ve already seen this movie. During the Reagan years, the Iran-contra conspirators violated the Constitution in the name of national security. But the first President Bush pardoned the major malefactors, and when the White House finally changed hands the political and media establishment gave Bill Clinton the same advice it’s giving Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie. Sure enough, the second Bush administration picked up right where the Iran-contra conspirators left off — which isn’t too surprising when you bear in mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some of those conspirators.

(Emphasis added.)

If "post-partisan" means forging consensus not only with one's political adversaries but with criminals and their abettors, as much for the sake of social delicacy as for political progress, you can count me out.

"Next week," writes Krugman, "[Obama's] going to swear to 'preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.' That’s not a conditional oath to be honored only when it’s convenient. And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable."

Ironically, after eight years of watching as one president picks and chooses when the Constitution will be honored is precisely, will we watch as the new president does the same, albeit with loftier motives?

Krugman's piece is going on the Readings list in the sidebar.

For those who figured Krugman couldn't irk conservatives any further

In a development likely to prove that living well is the best revenge, economist and pundit Paul Krugman received this year's Nobel Prize in economics.

Krugman received the award for his now-standard work on international trade policy begun in the 1970s, although many of the people this award will irritate most know him as a forceful and unrelenting critic--the word "shrill" has occasionally crossed their lips--of the Bush administration's policies on the economy and the Iraq war, especially since Krugman joined the Op-Ed page of the NYTimes in early 2000.

The award is unrelated to his current work as political critic, or to his talent for bringing high-level economic ideas into accessible prose. But the decision of the Nobel Committee to give the 2008 award to a neo-Keynesian like Krugman, at the very moment when the economic theories of Milt Friedman so beloved by the Republican party are deeply implicated in the current global economic meltdown, isn't going to go unnoticed.

But let me not accuse Messrs. Cheney and Bush of inconsistency. I don't really believe that they are vulgar Keynesians. They may advocate tax cuts when the economy is down, alleging that this will perk it up; but they also advocate tax cuts during booms. So they are perfectly consistent: they always want to cut taxes. Only the sales pitch changes with the state of the economy.

And that is the more serious bad news in Mr. Cheney's remarks: They suggest that the administration-in-waiting is not at all chastened by the questionable nature of its victory.

Many have argued that Mr. Bush, having lost the popular vote and won Florida (if he has) in a way that leaves his legitimacy in doubt, will try to calm the nation with centrist policies. Among other things, it is often assumed that those huge tax breaks for the rich that were the centerpiece of Mr. Bush's campaign are now on hold. Indeed, The Economist, which endorsed Mr. Bush and continues to cling to the belief that he is more moderate than his party, has even suggested — in what strikes me as delusional thinking — that he might keep the austerity-minded Lawrence Summers on as Treasury secretary. But now Mr. Cheney has signaled that he and Mr. Bush are as inclined as ever to push for big, irresponsible tax cuts.

And they may get them. Congress always has a hard time resisting calls to give away the store. It will be especially hard to maintain discipline after new budget projections are released next month. Because these projections will assume a higher rate of growth, and will not yet have factored in the revenue effects of slumping stock prices and the growth effects of declining technology investment, they will create a false sense that there is plenty of money to give away. Add a specious recession-fighting rationale and the temptation may be irresistible.

Some people have taken comfort from the fact that Mr. Bush will be a president without a mandate. But a president doesn't need a mandate to do a lot of economic damage.

Paul Krugman, NYTimes, 12/6/2000

Note the date. He was on the right story from before the beginning.

The only difference is they're saying it in public

Krugman's right:

Last week John Goodman, an influential figure in Republican health care circles, explained that we shouldn't worry about the growing number of Americans without health insurance, because there's no such thing as being uninsured. After all, you can always get treatment at an emergency room. […]

Mr. Goodman's assertion that lack of health insurance is no problem precisely echoed what President Bush said a year ago: "I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room." That's because both men - like Mr. Gramm - were just saying in public what modern Republicans say when they talk to each other. Despite attempts to feign sympathy, the leaders of today's G.O.P. fundamentally feel that Americans complaining about their economic and health care difficulties are, well, just a bunch of whiners.

Reading: "Too dumb to succeed?" Krugman says, "Don't count on it."

The 19th century "Know Nothings" were a nativist party who got their name because they mostly refused to answer questions about their semi-secret membership and organization. The know-nothings of the beginning of the 21st century, on the other hand, take a more literalist approach to the term.

At last night's Drinking Liberally, some of the finest minds of our generation^TM were mulling over the sad inevitability that pundits and advisors would soon be telling Obama and McCain that it's time to start courting the "undecided" vote.

If the "undecided"-friendly town hall debate from the 2004 presidential campaign taught us anything, it's that "undecided" is a euphemism for "low-information," which in turn is an even gentler euphemism for "uninformed," which, in turn--well, let's see:

Here, in case you've blocked the experience out of your memory, was the first question of that memorable evening:

Senator Kerry, after talking to several co-workers and family and friends, I asked the ones who said they were not voting for you, why. They said that you were too wishy-washy. Do you have a reply for them?

In the media-saturated environment of the contemporary presidential campaign, the "undecideds" have opted to treat the glut of information like a pie fight, in which the object is to make it to November while getting as little custard on themselves as possible.

Think of them as people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know . . . morons.

Yes, it's almost time for the quadrennial American love affair with the moron vote to burst into flame again. And it looks like Obama is largely abandoning the field to the Republicans; here's his reply to the Republican tire-gauge mockery of last week:

Now two points, one, they know they're lying about what my energy plan is, but the other thing is they're making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent. It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant.

Ouch. Senator, don't come a-courtin' the moron vote with plain talk like that!

Over on the other side of the aisle, the Republicans may have failed to make inroads with blacks or Hispanics, but that's not stopping them from going after the moron vote like lust-addled teenagers with a pocket full of roofies.

Here's Krugman from this morning's column:

The debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid.

Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.

What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

In the case of oil, this takes the form of pretending that more drilling would produce fast relief at the gas pump. In fact, earlier this week Republicans in Congress actually claimed credit for the recent fall in oil prices: “The market is responding to the fact that we are here talking,” said Representative John Shadegg.

What about the experts at the Department of Energy who say that it would take years before offshore drilling would yield any oil at all, and that even then the effect on prices at the pump would be “insignificant”? Presumably they’re just a bunch of wimps, probably Democrats. And the Democrats, as Representative Michele Bachmann assures us, “want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, take light rail to their government jobs.”

Is this political pitch too dumb to succeed? Don’t count on it.

The newest offshoot of identity politics: "It's a moron thing--you wouldn't understand."

Krugman's column is going onto the Reading list on the sidebar.

GOP strategists: We've got nothing, so let the Horton-izing of Obama begin!

It's been a long time since Paul Krugman has written anything you'd call optimistic. His streak ends today, with a column that might also begin to unruffled the feathers of Obama supporters after the winter of his skepticism.

In a stylistic turnabout almost worthy of his fellow opinionista MoDo, here's how he starts out:

Fervent supporters of Barack Obama like to say that putting him in the White House would transform America. With all due respect to the candidate, that gets it backward. Mr. Obama is an impressive speaker who has run a brilliant campaign — but if he wins in November, it will be because our country has already been transformed.

Obama's now-inevitable nomination, says Krugman, is evidence that American politics is becoming "de-racialized"--that "racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting."

Krugman reviews the usual suspects, beginning with the racial polarization that drove the 1966 and 1968 election cycles rightward. He also makes an interesting observation about the linkage of the Southern Strategy with opposition to Big Government:

Last week John McCain’s economic spokesman claimed that Barack Obama is President Bush’s true fiscal heir, because he’s “dedicated to the recent Bush tradition of spending money on everything.”

Now, the truth is that the Bush administration’s big-spending impulses have been largely limited to defense contractors. But more to the point, the McCain campaign is deluding itself if it thinks this issue will resonate with the public.

For Americans have never disliked Big Government in general. In fact, they love Social Security and Medicare, and strongly approve of Medicaid — which means that the three big programs that dominate domestic spending have overwhelming public support.

If Ronald Reagan and other politicians succeeded, for a time, in convincing voters that government spending was bad, it was by suggesting that bureaucrats were taking away workers’ hard-earned money and giving it to you-know-who: the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks, the welfare queen driving her Cadillac. Take away the racial element, and Americans like government spending just fine.

From here, Krugman traces the low crime numbers and "ending welfare as we know it," during the Clinton years as reasons that the "bums on welfare" theme stopped getting much sympathy for Republicans.

Of course, regarding Obama, what the Republican machine has been pushing so far this cycle hasn't had much to do with "welfare queens" and "strapping young bucks." Obama's story, after all, is at least as much an immigrant's tale as a blacks-in-America tale. The campaign that Republicans have been running against Obama is more generally a "scary outsider" campaign than it is specifically a "scary black man" campaign.

You know: The emphasis on his middle name. The fears about that school he went to. The confusion over his religion. Concerns about his suspicious habits of dress. Those charges of "elitism." All suggestions that the problem with Obama isn't his blackness, per se, but simply and more broadly his sinister foreignness. Nothing like this familiar sort of all-American race-baiting.

But that might be about to change. Krugman continues:

Let me add one more hypothesis: although everyone makes fun of political correctness, I’d argue that decades of pressure on public figures and the media have helped drive both overt and strongly implied racism out of our national discourse. For example, I don’t think a politician today could get away with running the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad.

Here--and this is a sentence I've never before gotten to use--here is where Krugman's optimism gets the better of him.

If the Republican "law and order" campaigning of which the "Willie Horton" ad was the examplar doesn't catch on this year, it won't be for lack of trying on the part of GOP strategists. Let's look at another item from this morning's readings:

On a website he calls ExposeObama.com, Floyd G. Brown, the producer of the "Willie Horton" ad that helped defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988, is preparing an encore.

Brown is raising money for a series of ads that he says will show Barack Obama to be out of touch on an issue of fundamental concern to voters: violent crime. One spot already on the Internet attacks the presumptive Democratic nominee for opposing a bill while he was an Illinois legislator that would have extended the death penalty to gang-related murders.

"When the time came to get tough, Obama chose to be weak. . . . Can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?" the video asks.

Though crime has taken a back seat in the presidential race to the war in Iraq and the economy, some Republicans think that Obama is vulnerable on this issue and hope to inject it into the campaign.

So let's be clear: We're in the main stretch of a campaign cycle where Fear of the Other is pretty much all that Republicans have had to run on (remember that GOP debate last winter where the candidates competed to be the most enthusiastically pro-GITMO and pro-torture?). The Bush administration's incompetent policies, and McCain's un-maverick-like adherance to their perpetuation, have rendered Iraq, terrorism, and the economy all non-starters at best for the GOP. McCain's coat-tails offer about as much for down-ticket candidates to grab onto as the waistband of his jockey shorts.

So if GOP strategists think they can gain anything from pulling "law and order" out of the trunk and shaking it in Americans' faces again, expect them to do it.

Krugman concludes:

[I]f Mr. Obama does win, it will symbolize the great change that has taken place in America. Racial polarization used to be a dominating force in our politics — but we’re now a different, and better, country.

Lord knows I'd love to see Krugman proved right--I'd love to live in a different and better America than the one the GOP has been diligently constructing for the last 40 years.

But we're not there yet.

This just in: Portland to blame for America's economic implosion

From today's Krugman:

[…] McCain campaign’s silence on the financial crisis has disappointed even my low expectations.

And when Mr. McCain’s economic advisers do speak up about the economy’s problems, they don’t inspire confidence. For example, last week one McCain economic adviser — Kevin Hassett, the co-author of “Dow 36,000” — insisted that everything would have been fine if state and local governments hadn’t tried to limit urban sprawl. Honest.

Up next: Have Portland's green bike boxes encouraged Iran's nuclear ambitions?