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The one thing I might say is that we shouldn’t really wonder what happened to Obama — he is who he always was. If you paid attention to what he actually said during the primary and the election, he was always a very conventional centrist. Progressives who flocked to his campaign basically deluded themselves, mistaking style for substance. I got huge flack for saying that at the time, but it was true, and events have borne it out.
Just to forestall the usual (or to try, anyway): no, we don’t know that Hillary would have been any better. And John Edwards turned out to be a worse person than one could have imagined. So I’m not trying to rerun the primary. I’m just pointing out that a lot of people were remarkably blind to the warning signs.
I had hoped that Obama would rise to the occasion, but he keeps not doing it. And no, I have no idea what progressives do in the near term.
-- Paul Krugman
It may be that liberals also made the same stereotypical lapse that conservatives did and assumed that he must be liberal because he is black.
I will also include here a bit from his column this morning, giving a more general assessment of our politico-economic straits.
_ _ _
No, what makes America look unreliable isn’t budget math, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided — specifically, they’re caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.
The truth is that as far as the straight economics goes, America’s long-run fiscal problems shouldn’t be all that hard to fix. It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs will, under current policies, push spending up faster than tax receipts. But the United States has far higher health costs than any other advanced country, and very low taxes by international standards. If we could move even part way toward international norms on both these fronts, our budget problems would be solved.
So why can’t we do that? Because we have a powerful political movement in this country that screamed “death panels” in the face of modest efforts to use Medicare funds more effectively, and preferred to risk financial catastrophe rather than agree to even a penny in additional revenues.
The real question facing America, even in purely fiscal terms, isn’t whether we’ll trim a trillion here or a trillion there from deficits. It is whether the extremists now blocking any kind of responsible policy can be defeated and marginalized.
-- Paul Krugman for The New York Times
I can also see the argument that our problems go beyond party and personalities, in that America is going through the turbulence of adjusting from being the pre-eminent world power after World War Two to becoming a somewhat more normal country. The world is a lot more competitive today, and it is certainly worth considering that Americans have developed supremely high expectations with a lowered sense of work-ethic and thrift (and let it be said that I am extremely American in this regard). Even if this is right, though, our Republicans and Teabaggers are making this turbulence a lot rougher than it perhaps needs to be, if they do not succeed in ruining us altogether.
Just to forestall the usual (or to try, anyway): no, we don’t know that Hillary would have been any better. And John Edwards turned out to be a worse person than one could have imagined. So I’m not trying to rerun the primary. I’m just pointing out that a lot of people were remarkably blind to the warning signs.
I had hoped that Obama would rise to the occasion, but he keeps not doing it. And no, I have no idea what progressives do in the near term.
-- Paul Krugman
It may be that liberals also made the same stereotypical lapse that conservatives did and assumed that he must be liberal because he is black.
I will also include here a bit from his column this morning, giving a more general assessment of our politico-economic straits.
_ _ _
No, what makes America look unreliable isn’t budget math, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided — specifically, they’re caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.
The truth is that as far as the straight economics goes, America’s long-run fiscal problems shouldn’t be all that hard to fix. It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs will, under current policies, push spending up faster than tax receipts. But the United States has far higher health costs than any other advanced country, and very low taxes by international standards. If we could move even part way toward international norms on both these fronts, our budget problems would be solved.
So why can’t we do that? Because we have a powerful political movement in this country that screamed “death panels” in the face of modest efforts to use Medicare funds more effectively, and preferred to risk financial catastrophe rather than agree to even a penny in additional revenues.
The real question facing America, even in purely fiscal terms, isn’t whether we’ll trim a trillion here or a trillion there from deficits. It is whether the extremists now blocking any kind of responsible policy can be defeated and marginalized.
-- Paul Krugman for The New York Times
I can also see the argument that our problems go beyond party and personalities, in that America is going through the turbulence of adjusting from being the pre-eminent world power after World War Two to becoming a somewhat more normal country. The world is a lot more competitive today, and it is certainly worth considering that Americans have developed supremely high expectations with a lowered sense of work-ethic and thrift (and let it be said that I am extremely American in this regard). Even if this is right, though, our Republicans and Teabaggers are making this turbulence a lot rougher than it perhaps needs to be, if they do not succeed in ruining us altogether.
