For the first time, Krugman has penned 2 anti-Obama screeds in the same week. Lately, Krugman has gotten his shots in at Obama on a typical Monday as kind of an antidote to Frank Rich's pro-Obama screeds that appear almost every Sunday. This Friday, however, Krugman decided to get the drop on Rich.
Krugman makes a valid point--the economy will be a critical issue this fall, and there are legitimate questions to be raised about Obama's economic platform. Krugman then, however, totally misses the forest for the trees by refusing to raise the same questions about HRC's economic platform. His repeated refusal to engage in such an inquiry raises serious questions about his basic approach to this intensifying conflict.
Like Krugman, John Edwards was my first choice this year. Like Krugman, I think that Edwards set the domestic policy tone in this campaign. Unlike Krugman, however, I'm painfully aware of the many ways in which HRC's economic philosophies clearly conflict w/ Edwards's basic philosophies.
There's the little matter, for example, of the conscious effort of HRC's campaign to amass CEO support in the campaign's early stages. There are 2 literal $ quotes in this Fortune piece that proclaimed HRC's big business bona fides. The first comes from, unsurprisingly, Terry Mac:
A roster of business endorsements says to voters that you'll be strong on the economy
The second comes from the article's author:
Through persistence and patience, Clinton has assembled what is probably the broadest CEO support among the candidates, ranging from Wall Street to Hollywood
While I know that Edwards had his little hedge fund detour, I don't recall him amassing broad CEO support "through persistence and patience." I sure as hell don't recall Bonior or Trippi stating that such a roster of CEO endorsements showed how strong Edwards would be on the economy. Such developments would, in fact, have been the antithesis of what JRE's campaign was all about.
While this Fortune article is about 8 months old, Krugman has, curiously, never mentioned it in any of his columns. Even more curiously, he has never mentioned the name of Mark Penn, HRC's chief strategist. Penn, is of course, the CEO of the PR firm of choice for Blackwater, Union Carbide, Phillip Morris, and just about any other sleazy entity one can imagine. In 2006, w/ Penn at the helm, Burson-Marsteller gave 57% of its political donations to GOP candidates.
I won't even go into HRC's impressive feat of political gymnastics on NAFTA. I will merely reiterate the point I made a few weeks ago about how the sidetracking of HRC's health care proposal to get NAFTA passed proved to be so costly. Even if, she privately opposed NAFTA all along despite her public pronouncements to the contrary, delaying the rollout of health care while her husband's WH was pummeling labor on NAFTA was the height of political stupidity. Bonior, who was in the House at the time, repeatedly noted that fact.
Krugman is free to retain his skepticism about Obama's economic program. He is free to believe that economic concerns will trump the clusterf**k in Iraq as an issue this fall despite the fact that HRC is now repeatedly stating that both she and McVain are better choices than Obama b/c of their superior "security" credentials. Krugman is not free, however, to repeatedly note the sliver in Obama's eye on economic issues while ignoring the log in HRC's eye on those very same issues.
I used to think that recycling half-truths on the NYT op-ed page were the primary province of David Brooks and the secondary province of Tom Friedman. I'm sorry to see that they now have company in that regard.