Shadow Campaign

DW's Post: How Paul Krugman Broke My Heart

Paul Krugman has really disappointed in recent weeks.  No, more, he broke my heart when he wrote that Obama supporters = cultists.  I've been a Krugman fan for years now, through thick and thin.  I have had no problems with his scathing policy editorials on Obama's health care plan; as concerned citizens, we should be able to take criticism from fair-minded people, if anything, it ought to make our candidates stronger.                                                                                                                                           

                                                                                                                                                                  

His blasts of Obama's heath care policy were fine, that's his very reasoned opinion I thought. 

But unlike the many many many editorials on Obama's health care proposal which Krugman wrote from his own inspiration, this most recent cultist article is a squarely Clintonian slander deeply tied to the their spin camp. 

Krugman was one of the first to blast Obama's health care proposal; the talking points he wrote were later adopted and disseminated by the Clinton team (and, most recently, even used as source material in negative mailers in Wisconsin). Fine, I reasoned, academics often advise politicians on complex matters.  No problem. 

But then Krugman does two things in recent weeks I find objectionable: 1) he argues that people who saw political motivation on behalf of the Clinton Machine to paint Obama as the "the black candidate" were being played like a fiddle by the media, and 2) calls Obama's supporters a cult following. 

How are these related?  Krugman maintains that people who saw an effort to "darken" Obama before South Carolina have been, essentially, sheep in the media's favorite game of Clinton-bashing.  But then, with sheep on the brain, Krugman himself sheepishly recants and legitimizes a story that the Clinton team has been trying to push (with disappointing success), that Obama's supporters are strange, deluded, celebrity obsessed, purely emotional ....in a word, cultish.

One one level, the claim is laughable.  All day long we hear people on TV and in the media tell us that Obama's base is: black people...black people...affluent, educated, white wine sippers...and lately, men.  Leave aside the inaccuracy of this statement, and definitely leave aside the African American component here -- a decidedly Clintonian tactic as of late -- can the pushers of the cultist theory really have it both ways?  Can the Obama supporters be simultaneously mindless, rabidly emotional AND the more affluent, best educated members of the Democratic party?  Does that even make sense? 

Krugman tells us that we should overlook the repeated and questionable efforts by Team Clinton to start up a conversation about race before South Carolina because the whole thing was a media invention.  We've been had, he says.  But he has no problem pushing an explicit Clinton talking point, one that follows in the vein of their attempts to de-legitimize Obama's gains in this campaign at every turn. 

Has Krugman been had, or is he just carrying the Clinton's water nowadays?

Restoration

Teddy Kennedy is hoarse, but you get the sense that the Kennedys are hoarse people. Any family that has been running for office for as long as they have, advocating, cajoling, speechifying, empathizing, defending, and politicking in shirt sleeves when it's 12 degrees outside has earned the right to sound a little hoarse. But why is Teddy, at an age when his peers are writing memoirs and sipping Dewars, running so hard for Obama? Why the fierce urgency of now now? East LA, New Mexico, Boston, Teddy's been running like his the family business is at stake. Running like this is the Kennedys' last shot to make things right.

If is true, and the Kennedys (at least the credible ones) see in Obama Bobby's final avatar, then Teddy is running not so much for Barack Obama as he is for his own family's legacy. That legacy has always been intertwined with the fortunes of the Democratic party and if JFK, Jr. had survived his own reckless youth, perhaps there would today be another Kennedy vying to lead the party out of the wilderness. So permit me some rank speculation: Teddy, though he embraced them, saw the Clintons as usurpers, accommodationists, inauthentic bearers of the party's (and the family's) historic mission. Sure, he tolerated them like boorish in-laws, but ultimately they always disappointed. The Kennedys poured the cement for the Great Society; the Clintons took a jackhammer to important parts of it, some would argue, in the name of triangulation.

I always thought Kennedy really lost his heart when he staged his improbable and costly insurgency against Carter in 1980, but what was ultimately abrogated in that run was the Kennedy claim on the party. Kennedy's bloody run was blamed, unfairly I feel, for the ascendancy of Reagan, so I have to believe that he was deeply invested in the success of Bill Clinton and the party's return to the White House. When the Clintons' timid centrism revealed itself, it was clear that the Kennedy legacy would remain in cold storage for another eight years. One more leap--the family saw JFK, Jr. as their next and perhaps last chance to burnish the brand and recapture its relevance on the national stage. And there is ample evidence that John was weighing a run when he perished in the waters off Martha's Vineyard during the last year of Clinton's second term. The seat he might have sought? Pat Moynihan's--which HRC ultimately captured. So who is Obama to Teddy? Not Bobby at all. He is JFK, Jr., in the race that was never run against the pretenders who had never measured up. It is not just Bill and Hillary who are seeking a restoration.