It is called The Blackmail Caucus.
He begins by laying out the stark policy differences between the two candidates:
If President Obama is re-elected, health care coverage will expand dramatically, taxes on the wealthy will go up and Wall Street will face tougher regulation. If Mitt Romney wins instead, health coverage will shrink substantially, taxes on the wealthy will fall to levels not seen in 80 years and financial regulation will be rolled back.
He suggests is it fine to decide between the two based on the policies they would follow. He then attacks the alternative justification that is being offered, which he notes as follows:
Lately, however, I’ve seen a growing number of Romney supporters making a quite different argument. Vote for Mr. Romney, they say, because if he loses, Republicans will destroy the economy.
That is how he takes on the notion, the major justification for the Des Moines Register endorsement of the Republican, that Romney will be better able to get things done. Before he addresses the endorsement specifically, he writes
The argument is phrased in terms of “partisan gridlock,” as if both parties were equally extreme. But they aren’t. This is, in reality, all about appeasing the hard men of the Republican Party.
Please keep reading.
There is a lot more in this column.
It includes taking on the notion that Obama has accomplished nothing in the past few year, but also notes that in the case both of health care reform and financial reform they will not be fully accomplished unless Barack OBama is reelected.
He is also dismissive of the argument of the need for a "Grand Bargain" on several grounds First he writes
America isn’t facing any kind of short-run fiscal crisis, except in the fevered imagination of a few Beltway insiders.
He then pivotes somewhat and argues that such a bargain would be worthless
as long as the G.O.P. remained as extreme as it is, because the next Republican president, following the lead of George W. Bush, would just squander the gains on tax cuts and unfunded wars.
The key for him is not Obama's ability to get things done in a 2nd term , rather it is whether Republicans will continue to be as obstructionist as they have during his first. He goes through examples, focusing especially on the debt limit crisis that undercut the debt rating of the US. He also says that Democratic Senators would not be as obstructionist towards a President Romney as the Republicans under Mitch McConnell have been during the past four years. In that sense there is some bitter truth to the idea that Romney might experience less "partisan gridlock" than we have been seeing.
But then Krugman puts it all in focus with this closing paragraph:
But are we ready to become a country in which “Nice country you got here. Shame if something were to happen to it” becomes a winning political argument? I hope not. By all means, vote for Mr. Romney if you think he offers the better policies. But arguing for Mr. Romney on the grounds that he could get things done veers dangerously close to accepting protection-racket politics, which have no place in American life.
protection-racket politics - that might be the best description I have yet seen of the Republican approach to doing the government's business during the past four years.
In fact, that also applies to most of the 8 years of the Presidency of George W. Bush.
And let's go back to the Presidency of Bill Clinton. Remember, there was not a single Republican vote for his first budget, and claims that it would destroy the economy. That budget was the key piece to the nation adding 22 million jobs. At least Obama got some votes both for his stimulus (3 Republicans in the Senate, none in the House) and for the auto bailout, in the latter case including VP nominee Paul Ryan.
I think this is a powerful column. It is reality-based. It is honest. And for those two reasons it is obvious how little Krugman thinks of Romney and why, despite valid criticisms he has offered over the past four years (such as the stimulus being too small) he strongly supports Obama.