A national -- no, make that global -- resource

I'm talking about Paul Krugman. He is truly a remarkable thinker, teacher, writer. Tomorrow's column is just one among hundreds that actually teach something. He is to economics what Pauline Kael was to film criticism.

Politics was the point

I like Rebecca Traister a lot, mostly. And I like the fact that she takes our Patriarch in Chief to task for his decision and his language in reversing healthcare experts' judgment about sales of Plan B. But she's still stuck in Obama Apologia mode:

"It should no longer come as a surprise that the president of the United States is, on perhaps an unconscious level, an old-school patriarch. What’s startling is the degree to which Obama seems not to have learned from any of his past gaffes, how no one seems to have told him – or told him in a way that he’s absorbed – that the best way to address a question of women’s health and rights is probably not by making it about his role as a father.

"This might be an especially valuable chat to have with the president as he moves into 2012 and toward an election in which he is going to be relying on the support of people he has just managed to anger, offend and speak down to — women. The least he could do is learn to address them with respect."

Not learned from past gaffes? This assumes it was an unconscious habit of mind, expressed in an unfortunate turn of phrase. But however he framed it, it's quite apparent that this decision was deliberate, political and his from the get-go. It's a silly lie that Sibelius made this call independently and that he only found out about it when we all did. He and his political advisors, the Boys Club of the West Wing, made the calculation that most voters -- or enough of them, anyway -- aren't ready to think about their daughters' sexuality, and so he simply threw out the data and ignored the considered expertise of medical professionals.

There's real sexism here, but it's not unconscious. It's considered. He thinks that the political price to be paid for principled action would be greater than the political price to be paid for unprincipled action. He thinks most people aren't ready for this, and anyway, women voters still have nowhere else to go.

Make mine a double - updated

Surprising outcome? Say what? Draconian deficit-reduction was the whole idea of this sword of Damocles.

Anyway, looks like we're gonna get double-dip. Conventional wisdom -- and Mitt's strategy, I'm sure -- will be that this shit lands on Obama's shoes. Is there anything he can do to reverse this? I don't mean anything substantive -- it's far too late for that. I mean something political. Can he sell the idea that the GOP drove us into recession with their ideological refusal to tax the rich? Can he sell anything at all?

Update: Lest "surprising outcome" look cryptic, that was how the story was headlined last night. Some editor clearly thought better of it.

It'll be our fault -- in fact, it already is

One of the stranger logical pathologies of the Obama phenomenon is the way in which his acolytes reconfigure the known universe around his blankness, emptiness and passivity. There's no questioning of his own agency in what happens to him, or to us. He is the still point in a changing world, and it is the responsibility of that world to ensure that his actions (or, rather, non-actions) come out (or are seen to come out) right.

Case in point, this post by Earl Ofari Hutchinson. He ticks off a damning bill of attainder as if it were a litany of silly personal objections by self-unaware dilletantes. A more reasonable reading of that list would be that the needs of this moment in history were pretty clear, and Obama flunked in responding to them -- most centrally on the economy, not because he didn't kiss the right historical icons, but because he failed to step up to what this present situation demanded.

Ford didn't lose to Carter because of Reagan; he lost because of Watergate. Carter didn't lose to Reagan because of Kennedy; he lost because of recession and Iran. If Obama loses in 2012, it won't be because liberals fail to fake an orgasm -- it'll be because he flunked. It's a bizarro kind of tautology to insist that whole populations reorient their perceptions and attitudes to make cause not equal effect.

Twilight of the neocons

Leslie Gelb has a silly piece up on Daily Beast, warning that the neocons are roaring back (and suggesting that Mitt Romney will carry their water). He must live inside as much of a bubble as the rest of the VSPs. Has he watched any of the Republican debates? Is he not aware that the Grand Old Basketcase has largely abandoned the expansionist neocon agenda in favor of old-style, Pat Buchananesque isolationism? Hasn't he heard these wingnuts fighting to see who can yell, "Bring the troops home!!" louder? Did he not see Herman Cain reveal he isn't even familiar with the term "neo-conservative"?

The fact is that, when it comes to electoral politics, Obama is now totally safe on foreign policy. Of course, it wouldn't have been very much of an issue anyway, given the Great Recession. But the guy who killed Osama bin Laden and Muammar al-Qaddafi is not vulnerable on this, er, front -- not to any of these folks, Romney included. If the Republicans win, it will be because of the economy. Period.

Post this on the locker room bulletin board

This is a good piece, and it could be important. I hope it gets widely circulated. Obviously, the bankers' cluelessness stands in pointed contrast to this. Money quote (pun intended): “'I have no problem with capitalism. I have no problem with a market economy. But I find the way the financial system is functioning deeply unethical,' Herbert Haberl, 51, said in Berlin."

That's the key point, the one embodied in Occupy Wall Street's brilliant name, the one that opens the door to a successful global movement, the one to keep hammering home: This is not about the failure of capitalism; it's about the need for financial capital to cede the stage in favor of production capital. Banking needs to become boring again. Innovation needs to move from financial instruments to transformative technologies. The rules of the road need to favor those who actually create something of value -- a product or a service -- rather than those who get rich from surfing the economy itself, from arbitrage.

Bloomberg vs. Bloomberg

Paul Krugman today points to a strong piece by Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, "Regulatory uncertainty: A phony explanation for our jobs problem," which completely debunks the GOP's beloved confidence fairy dust. This chimera and the "invisible bond vigilantes," have been our Cassandra's Homeric epithets for the past two years -- truths that cannot, it seems, be uttered in public frequently enough to penetrate the miasma of lies in which we live, or to which our putatively Democratic administration dovens.

The piece closes thus:

"In conclusion, when looking at both what employers are doing in terms of hiring and investing and what they (and their economists) are saying in private surveys, it’s nearly impossible to make the argument that uncertainty about regulations is holding back the economy. A Bloomberg News editorial makes the point even more broadly:

'There is no doubt that certainty is generally preferable to uncertainty, in the economy as in most aspects of life….But there is no evidence that uncertainty has increased during the Obama presidency, or that, if it has, the president’s policies are responsible for it…The charge of “creating uncertainty” is a way to blame Obama for the U.S.’s economic trials without having to explain the connection.'”

Bloomberg News, eh? So, here's what the eponym himself said on Meet the Press this past Sunday, from MSNBC's transcript:

MAYOR BLOOMBERG: Well, nobody has any confidence. If you're a bank and you have money, would you make a loan when people are talking about putting you in jail for what happened in the mortgage crisis three, four years ago? You hunker down. If you're a business, would you go take a loan and expand and hire more people when every day there's talk about different regulation, different tax policy? Business has to know what it's going to be in the future to plan because hiring people is a long-term commitment. If you're an individual, would you go take that extra vacation, buy a new house and that sort of thing when you're not sure whether Washington is going to do what's right to keep job creation going in America? That's the--in the end, it is confidence, confidence, confidence.

So much for our great Third Party hope. What it does suggest, though, is that he may actually be thinking seriously about running. Nonsense of this crassness is usually a harbinger of that.