I respect Paul Krugman quite a bit, but I'm a little miffed at his most recent offering in the Times opinion page (as shared on the Goog reader today by CKG). He attempts to set up an argument for Obama by arguing against McCain. I hate when people do this. The Republicans pulled this in 2000 and 2008. In 2000, Gore carried so much baggage due to his connection to Clinton that he was painted as a political pariah. "It will be four more years of Clinton," they exclaimed. (In much the same way Democrats are talking about McCain being an extension of the Bush administration.) And in 2008, the logic in voting for Bush again over Kerry was, essentially, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know. We should know better than this by now.
But Krugman frames his argument as such:
So what do we know about the readiness of the two men most likely to end up taking that cal [about the financial infrastructure crumbling]? Well, Barack Obama seems well informed and sensible about matters economic and financial. John McCain, on the other hand, scares me.
I would love to know what Obama has said that makes Krugman believe he is well informed. McCain scares me too, but again, that doesn't do anything for selling me on what Obama can do aside from being "not scary" about the economy. He continues:
About Mr. Obama: it’s a shame that he didn’t show more leadership in the debate over the bailout bill, choosing instead to leave the issue in the hands of Congressional Democrats, especially Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. But both Mr. Obama and the Congressional Democrats are surrounded by very knowledgeable, clear-headed advisers, with experienced crisis managers like Paul Volcker and Robert Rubin always close at hand.
Krugman never even entertains the thought that perhaps the reason Obama didn't show more leadership in the debate over the bailout bill was because he didn't have anything prescient to say. That maybe Obama doesn't really get it either. But for Krugman, this is okay as Obama has chosen to leave the discourse on this matter to his "very knowledgeable, clear-headed advisers . . . crisis managers . . . " But this logic reminds me far too much of the logic republicans used to defend Bush when his intelligence and presidential acuity came into question. Bush defenders (including myself, for some time) would reference the Bush cabinet and insist that even if Bush wasn't the most qualified president in our history, he had assembled an all-star cabinet to advise his every decision. I think at this stage of the game we can definitively say that doesn't necessarily work.
Krugman then continues the column by citing several more examples of why McCain would be a financially disastrous President while not offering a single argument for Obama's financial expertise.
I want to be clear that I am not trying to argue McCain over Obama with regards to who is better suited to right our crumbling economy. The point is that we need to be finding reasons why one candidate will be better than the other; and it's not just about the economy, it's about every issue. I don't think that's too much to ask.
