The other day I wrote that Paul Krugman’s continuing attacks on Barack Obama prove that the Senator from Illinois must be doing someting right. But there’s more going on here than a dispute about health insurance mandates. Obama’s real crime can be found in this Newsweek poll:
Among those most likely to attend the [Iowa] caucuses, Obama has moved substantially ahead of Clinton–35 to 29 percent.
When his numbers were lower, Obama offered political hacks like Krugman a chance to pretend they weren’t in the tank for Hillary. But then he started behaving as if he had a legitimate right to compete. And–even worse–he presumed to question Her Majesty’s health care plan.
Now, Obama has had the immortal crust to defend himself. This is just too much for the faux-progressive crowd. Time to remind him of his proper place. Thus, we have Krugman wannabes like Mark Thoma accusing Obama of being the attacker:
Krugman has clearly gotten to the Barack Obama campaign, to the point where they have released an attack on him to try and defend their (indefensible) position …
The voters of Iowa, meanwhile, don’t seem to think Obama’s positions are quite so disturbing. Here’s what the pollsters are hearing from Democrats who plan to vote in the caucuses:
Obama is much more likely than Clinton to be viewed as the candidate best able to bring about change (42 percent vs. 28 percent for Clinton) and as the most personally likeable (41 percent vs. 18 percent).
That is what Krugman, Thoma, and the other faux-progressives really find “indefensible” about Obama.
Comments 2
“Faux-progressives”
You use that phrase a lot. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Krugman is by far more progressive than Obama. Obama is left-center; Krugman is pretty far left. There’s nothing “faux” about either of them. It might sound nice as a general term of derision, but it doesn’t make sense, unless you are making some sort of nihilistic argument that every person in the public sphere who pretends to have leftward tendencies is faking it.
Posted 09 Dec 2007 at 8:40 am ¶I use the term “faux-progressive” to designate people who pose as progressives but spend most of their time defending the status quo. A classic example would be Krugman’s resistance to social security reform.
For health care, faux-progressives promote statist solutions (i.e. government-run health care) conceived two generations ago–despite the fact that such solutions have uniformly failed.
And if Krugman is a “progressive,” why did he work for the Reagan Administration and Enron?
Posted 09 Dec 2007 at 2:08 pm ¶Post a Comment