Paul Krugman, Swift Boating?

Is Paul Krugman one of (shudder) them?

David Seaton's News Links
The Obama campaign is alert to the spreading of smears and rumors against their candidate. Apparently they have their work cut out for them. This from the Washington Post.

The new advertisement running in Findlay, in which Obama is pictured with his white mother and white grandparents as he talks about developing a "deep and abiding faith in the country I love" while growing up in the Kansas heartland, is dismissed by residents of College Street as the desperate lies of another dishonest Washington politician. And they say that Obama's moves to put distance between himself and the Muslim community, with his campaign declining invitations to visit mosques and Obama volunteers removing two women in head scarves from the camera range at a rally in Detroit earlier this month are just a too-late effort to disguise his true beliefs.

For the past month, two students from the University of Findlay have spent their Tuesday nights walking from door to door in the city to tell voters about Obama. Erik Cramer and Sarah Everly target Democrats and swing voters exclusively, but they've still experienced mixed results. Sometimes, at a front door, they mention their purpose only to have a dozen rumors thrown back at them and the door slammed. "People tell us that we're in the wrong town," Everly said.

The McCain campaign seems to smell blood in the water. This, again, from the Washington Post.

Sen. John McCain's allies have seized on a new and aggressive line of attack against Sen. Barack Obama, casting the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee as an opportunistic and self-obsessed politician who will do and say anything to get elected.(...) "In his time on the national stage, he has consistently put his party and his self-interest first," McCain strategist Steve Schmidt said in the memo. "We have seen Barack Obama forced to choose between principle and the interests of himself and his party. He has always chosen the latter."

Schmidt said in an interview that the campaign intends to point out "every day" that Obama broke his promise to accept public financing for his campaign, and that he has not made good on his pledge to debate his Republican opponent anytime and anywhere.

"It's a statement of fact that he discards people, and he discards positions when they become inconvenient for him," Schmidt said Friday. "When politicians say one thing and then do another, like Senator Obama has done, voters wonder about the steadfastness of the character of the person sitting in the Oval Office."(...) The aggressive rhetoric aimed at Obama began to emerge June 22, when Sen. Lindsey O. Graham, a national co-chairman of the McCain campaign, appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press." The normally collegial senator from South Carolina took direct aim at Obama's integrity.

"He's a calculating politician," Graham said. "The bottom line about Barack Obama, whatever the position -- whether it be Iraq, campaign finance reform, public financing -- he's going to take a tack that allows him to win. He wants to win beyond anything else, even more than keeping his word."

That theme was repeated Thursday in a conference call with reporters about the Supreme Court's decision to affirm the Second Amendment right to own a gun. McCain adviser Randy Scheunemann complained about what he called Obama's constantly changing positions.

"What's becoming clear in this campaign," he said, is that Obama "has demonstrated that there is no position he holds that isn't negotiable. He will say or do anything if it furthers his political purposes."

But, now Paul Krugman weighs in from the New York Times

"Progressive activists, in particular, overwhelmingly supported Mr. Obama during the Democratic primary even though his policy positions, particularly on health care, were often to the right of his rivals’. In effect, they convinced themselves that he was a transformational figure behind a centrist facade.

They may have had it backward.

Mr. Obama looks even more centrist now than he did before wrapping up the nomination. Most notably, he has outraged many progressives by supporting a wiretapping bill that, among other things, grants immunity to telecom companies for any illegal acts they may have undertaken at the Bush administration’s behest.

The candidate’s defenders argue that he’s just being pragmatic — that he needs to do whatever it takes to win, and win big, so that he has the power to effect major change. But critics argue that by engaging in the same “triangulation and poll-driven politics” he denounced during the primary, Mr. Obama actually hurts his election prospects, because voters prefer candidates who take firm stands.

In any case, what about after the election? The Reagan-Clinton comparison suggests that a candidate who runs on a clear agenda is more likely to achieve fundamental change than a candidate who runs on the promise of change but isn’t too clear about what that change would involve.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that Mr. Obama really is a centrist, after all." - Paul Krugman, NYT

It seems to me that there are two clear alternatives here:

Either Paul Krugman has joined the Republican attack machine or the Republican attack machine has hit on a very productive, fact based line of attack, one which depends for its effectiveness, not on smears and innuendo but on Barack Obama's observable actions.

Since I find it difficult to believe that Paul Krugman is part of some vast right-wing conspiracy, I imagine that the second line of reasoning is the correct one.

What I think is happening is, that under the pressure of reality a certain syndrome of Obamamania that Virginia Postrel identified in The Atlantic, is beginning to unravel:

"Plenty of candidates attract supporters who disagree with them on some issues. Obama is unusual, however. He attracts supporters who not only disagree with his stated positions but assume he does too. They project their own views onto him and figure he is just saying what other, less discerning voters want to hear."

Barack Obama has a very thin CV, but a fascinating story and many people have bought into the story. He should stick to the story, it is all he has got.

Changing it now on a daily basis is a fatal mistake. DS
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PS: I've just heard the most amazing and absurd anti-Obama rumor!

Apparently his middle name is not, repeat NOT "Hussein"!

It's HERMAN!!!

Barry thought is was soooo lame that when he was fifteen he asked his mother, Stanley Ann, if he could change it legally, as she had suffered so much ribbing because of her name she gave him permission.

He thought Hussein sounded really cool and the rest is history.

Neat, huh?

Pass it on to see how they squash it.

Rebuilding the left - 2: Necessity creates the organ

"Us workin' folkses, all get together,
'Cause we ain't got a chance anymore.
We ain't got a chance anymore."
Tom Joad - Woody Guthrie

David Seaton's News Links
Paul Krugman has a very good piece in the NYT abstracted below. In it Krugman illustrates the nub of the class-politics question: you can't have a "class struggle" if working people don't believe that class exists and that if they do believe that classes exist, they are deluded into believing that they really belong "in pectore" to the upper-middle class or even to the upper classes themselves.

You obviously can't have a "class struggle" if only the richest are "struggling," using organizations like the "Club for Growth" and the "Cato Institute", which Krugman mentions or by massive donations to the Republican Party's war chest. The Democratic Party, should any pin too many hopes upon it, is also controlled by huge contributions from rich individuals and corporations; that is why Howard Dean's strategies of micro-financing have such a potential for changing US politics.

Most troubling of all is the Republican Party's deliberate effort to disenfranchise people of color. I cannot think of a clearer proof of the neo-fascism that the party of Abraham Lincoln has come to represent.

I'm a huge fan of Paul Krugman's, but if one thing is obvious to me (and probably to Paul Krugman too) it is that university professors, because of the guaranteed employment which comes with tenure, are not going to be the backbone of the reborn left... It has to be the victims who stand up for themselves and make their own FDR's speech to Congress of April 29th 1938,

"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe, if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.

America's challenge is to rebuild democracy, literally from the ground up. DS

Paul Krugman: Distract and Disenfranchise - New York Times

Abstract: Median income has risen only 17 percent since 1980, while the income of the richest 0.1 percent of the population has quadrupled. The gap between the rich and the middle class is as wide now as it was in the 1920s, when the political coalition that would eventually become the New Deal was taking shape. And voters realize that society has changed. They may not pore over income distribution tables, but they do know that today’s rich are building themselves mansions bigger than those of the robber barons. They may not read labor statistics, but they know that wages aren’t going anywhere: according to the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of workers believe that it’s harder to earn a decent living today than it was 20 or 30 years ago.(...) The Republican Party’s adherence to an outdated ideology leaves it with big problems. It can’t offer domestic policies that respond to the public’s real needs. So how can it win elections? The answer, for a while, was a combination of distraction and disenfranchisement. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were themselves a massive, providential distraction; until then the public, realizing that Mr. Bush wasn’t the moderate he played in the 2000 election, was growing increasingly unhappy with his administration. And they offered many opportunities for further distractions. Rather than debating Democrats on the issues, the G.O.P. could denounce them as soft on terror. And do you remember the terror alert, based on old and questionable information, that was declared right after the 2004 Democratic National Convention? But distraction can only go so far. So the other tool was disenfranchisement: finding ways to keep poor people, who tend to vote for the party that might actually do something about inequality, out of the voting booth. Remember that disenfranchisement in the form of the 2000 Florida “felon purge,” which struck many legitimate voters from the rolls, put Mr. Bush in the White House in the first place. And disenfranchisement seems to be what much of the politicization of the Justice Department was about. Several of the fired U.S. attorneys were under pressure to pursue allegations of voter fraud — a phrase that has become almost synonymous with “voting while black.” Former staff members of the Justice Department’s civil rights division say that they were repeatedly overruled when they objected to Republican actions, ranging from Georgia’s voter ID law to Tom DeLay’s Texas redistricting, that they believed would effectively disenfranchise African-American voters. READ IT ALL (bootleg)

Krugman on the coming recession - NYT

David Seaton's News Links

The bursting of the housing bubble has an objective effect on the economy, of course, but I'm more interested in the subjective effects of the loss of value of the only thing most Americans possess that is of any real value. What is the subjective cost of the loss of the "wealth effect": the idea that one is rich because of the sharp rise in the paper value of one's dwelling? As the disaster in the Middle East gathers speed and steam and its complex knock-on effects make themselves evident, we could be looking at the sinister synergies of a massive "feel bad" movement. If a war went sour with everybody feeling rich it would be different from losing a war when people are feeling recently impoverished... There is a good chance that we'll soon be looking at a "perfect storm" of pessimism. DS

Abstract: The last time things were this confused was early in 2001, when most economists failed to realize that the United States was sliding into recession. If that sounds ominous, it should: the bond market, which has a pretty good record of forecasting recessions, is pointing toward a serious economic slowdown next year. Before I explain what the bond market is telling us, let’s talk about why the economy may be at a turning point. Between mid-2003 and mid-2006, economic growth in the United States was fueled mainly by a huge housing boom... That housing boom has now gone bust. But the optimists and pessimists disagree both about how bad the bust will get and about how much damage the housing slump will do to the economy... Most, though not all, of the ... economic numbers that came out this week were ... substantially weaker than expected. Pessimists feel vindicated by the downbeat data. Nouriel Roubini..., who has been forecasting a housing-led recession for some time, ... predicts zero growth for the current quarter. Economists at Deutsche Bank say the same thing.(...) most forecasters are still telling us not to worry. So whom should you listen to? And how can you avoid believing what you want to believe? Maybe the best answer is to look at what the financial markets say. Not the stock market, which is a notoriously bad indicator of the economy’s direction, but the bond market. (Paul Samuelson, the Nobel Prize-winning ... economist, famously quipped that the stock market had predicted nine of the last five recessions). Since last summer, when the housing bust became unmistakable, interest rates on long-term bonds have fallen sharply. They’re now yielding much less than short-term bonds. The fact that investors are willing to buy those long-term bonds anyway tells us that these investors expect interest rates to fall. And that will happen only if the economy weakens, forcing the Federal Reserve to cut rates. So bond buyers are, in effect, betting on a future economic slowdown. How serious a slump is the bond market predicting? Pretty serious. Right now, statistical models ... give roughly even odds that we’re about to experience a formal recession. And since even a slowdown that doesn’t formally qualify as a recession can lead to a sharp rise in unemployment, the odds are very good — maybe 2 to 1 — that 2007 will be a very tough year. Luckily, we’ve got good leadership for the coming economic storm: the White House is occupied by a man who’s ideologically flexible, listens to a wide variety of views, and understands that policy has to be based on careful analysis, not gut instincts. Oh, wait. READ IT ALL (bootleg)