Anti-Establishment Krugman Goes After Obama and Geithner

The Midas Letter has posted Newsweek’s cover story on Paul Krugman this Monday morning, and it’s a good read. Never thought I’d feel a bond of admiration and affection for an economist but the Princeton professor and NY Times columnist warms my heart. It helps that his colleague at Princeton, historian Sean Wilentz, apparently feels a similar sense of kinship to the rebellious Nobel-Prize winning numbers guy.

Recall that Krugman recognized the superiority of Hillary Clinton's health care plan to Obama’s during the Democratic primary and come to think of it, Wilentz methodically debunked every egregious attempt by the Obama campaign to smear the Clintons as racists.

Go, Princeton!

But back to the NewsWeek article by Evan Thomas. Here’s the deal:

Paul Krugman has all the credentials of a ranking member of the East Coast liberal establishment: a column in The New York Times, a professorship at Princeton, a Nobel Prize in economics. He is the type you might expect to find holding forth at a Georgetown cocktail party or chumming around in the White House Mess of a Democratic administration. But in his published opinions, and perhaps in his very being, he is anti-establishment. Though he was a scourge of the Bush administration, he has been critical, if not hostile, to the Obama White House.

In his twice-a-week column and his blog, Conscience of a Liberal, he criticizes the Obamaites for trying to prop up a financial system that he regards as essentially a dead man walking. In conversation, he portrays Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and other top officials as, in effect, tools of Wall Street (a ridiculous charge, say Geithner defenders). These men and women have "no venality," Krugman hastened to say in an interview with NEWSWEEK. But they are suffering from "osmosis," from simply spending too much time around investment bankers and the like. In his Times column the day Geithner announced the details of the administration's bank-rescue plan, Krugman described his "despair" that Obama "has apparently settled on a financial plan that, in essence, assumes that banks are fundamentally sound and that bankers know what they're doing. It's as if the president were determined to confirm the growing perception that he and his economic team are out of touch, that their economic vision is clouded by excessively close ties to Wall Street."

If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am), reading Krugman makes you uneasy. You hope he's wrong, and you sense he's being a little harsh (especially about Geithner), but you have a creeping feeling that he knows something that others cannot, or will not, see. By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring. But sometimes, beneath the pleasant murmur and tinkle of cocktails, the old guard cannot hear the sound of ice cracking. The in crowd of any age can be deceived by self-confidence, as Liaquat Ahamed has shown in "Lords of Finance," his new book about the folly of central bankers before the Great Depression, and David Halberstam revealed in his Vietnam War classic, "The Best and the Brightest." Krugman may be exaggerating the decay of the financial system or the devotion of Obama's team to preserving it. But what if he's right, or part right? What if President Obama is squandering his only chance to step in and nationalize—well, maybe not nationalize, that loaded word—but restructure the banks before they collapse altogether?

Read more.

Obama’s Speech: No Specific Solutions to the Financial Crisis

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz was one of the few opinion writers in the 2008 Democratic primary who saw through the Obama camp’s repeated attempts to smear Bill and Hillary Clinton as racists.

Since the election, the Clintons have demonstrated remarkable forgiveness and resolve in continuing to put their considerable talents to work on behalf of America and the wider world.

As Katalusis readers are well aware, I’ve so far been unable to match the graciousness of the Clintons - but back to the present.

I hadn’t read anything by Professor Wilentz in some time when I spotted his analysis of Obama’s speech last night posted at the Daily Beast. In keeping with his usual style, Wilentz is objective, courteous, and fair in his assessment of what our new president said or neglected to say.

It’s been nearly a decade since the country has heard a vibrant, full-throated Democratic speech from a president of the United States. President Obama gave one tonight. In presenting his budget priorities to the Congress and the American people, he provided a clear defense of the federal government’s historic role as a catalyst for economic growth and the nation’s welfare. From the Transcontinental Railroad to the Interstate Highway System, he explained, private wealth has always expanded with the help of the national government. And with that, the president exorcised the political spirit of Ronald Reagan from Capitol Hill.

Energy, health, education—these are at the top of the administration’s agenda. If nothing had happened last September, when Lehman Brothers was allowed to collapse, these policies also would have been at the top. But a great deal has changed since the Democratic convention ratified the party’s platform, with these same priorities. The country and the world have plunged into the greatest economic crisis since the Depression. And that must be the president’s chief preoccupation.

No matter what the White House decides to do, it should have made some decisions by now—and President Obama should have announced them tonight.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office on March 4, 1933, the nation had been in a depression for nearly four years. The banking system had virtually collapsed; the credit markets were frozen; and unemployment had exceeded 25 percent. The calamity that President Obama confronts is still in its earliest stages. He faces the challenge of sparing the country the kind of suffering that Roosevelt inherited from Herbert Hoover and that led to the New Deal.

Today, the banking system is near collapse; the credit markets are nearly frozen; and unemployment is rising dangerously. And the system is vastly more complex than it was in the early 1930s. This is the heart of the crisis—and the president lucidly explained much of it in his speech. But he should also have proposed specific solutions because until he does the crisis will continue to deepen.

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Obama’s Comparison of Himself to Lincoln: “A Certain Kind of Hubris”

Obama with supporters in Springfield, IL on Feb. 10, 2007. Photo credits: Getty Images.

Very early in the Democratic primary, I suggested to a friend afflicted by the euphoria typical of Obama supporters that her candidate simply lacked the experience to be president of the United States. Her answer? He has as much experience as Abraham Lincoln had when he became president.

Never mind the odds of Barack Obama demonstrating comparable character, judgment, and leadership skills to Abraham Lincoln are pretty remote; there is also the reality that today’s world is a much more dangerous and complex place than the world Honest Abe knew back in the 19th Century. We drive cars, for cripe sake, and we’ve got weapons of mass destruction.

In the end, however, euphoria triumphed over common sense or even a modicum of skepticism in the 2008 election and in the midst of a global financial crisis and two wars, Americans elected president the least qualified candidate in the field.

Now President-elect Obama, educated at Columbia and Harvard, continues to encourage his adoring public to associate him with the self-educated Lincoln who studied law in the evenings by firelight.

A few contemporary historians offer a reality check or two.

In a post titled Straw Man? Historians say Obama is no Lincoln, Harris and Burns at Politico write:

‘“In Barack Obama's appearance last month on CBS's ‘60 Minutes,’ the conversation turned to the president-elect's long-time love of Lincoln.

‘“There is a wisdom there,’ Obama told interviewer Steve Kroft,’ and a humility about his approach to government, even before he was president, that I just find very helpful.’

“Humility? Obama's frequent invocations of Abraham Lincoln — a man enshrined in myth and marble with his own temple on the National Mall — would not at first blush say much about his own instincts for modesty or self-effacement.

‘“And now there are early rumblings of a backlash to Obama's ostentatious embrace of all things Lincoln, with his not-so-subtle invitations to compare the 44th president to the 16th, the ‘Savior of the Union.’

“Simply put, some scholars think the comparisons have gone a bit over the top hat.

“Sean Wilentz, a scholar in American history at Princeton, said many presidents have sought to frame themselves in the historical legacies of illustrious predecessors, but he couldn't find any examples quite so brazen.

‘“Sure, they've looked back to Washington and even, at times, Jackson. Reagan echoed and at times swiped FDR's rhetoric,’ said Wilentz. ‘But there's never been anything like this, and on this scale. Ever.’

‘“Eric Foner, a Columbia historian who has written extensively on the Civil War era, agreed that comparing one's self to Lincoln sets a rather high bar for success, and could come off like ‘a certain kind of hubris.’

‘“It'd be a bit like a basketball player turning up before his first game and saying, ‘I'm kind of modeling myself on Michael Jordan,’ he said. ‘If you can do it, fine. If you're LeBron James, that'll work. But people may make that comparison to your disadvantage.’

“As it happens, Obama may find this an entirely apt comparison.”

‘“I'm LeBron, baby," he told a Chicago Tribune reporter at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. ‘I can play on this level. I got some game.’

“That kind of preening highlights a risk that many presidents have encountered as they gaze in history's mirror.”

Read more.

A Quagmire of Misogyny: The MSM, the Netroots, and MoveOn.Org

The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece today by Dorothy Rabinowitz titled News Flash: The Media Back Obama. Here’s a news flash for Rabinowitz: the media has backed Obama since the early days of the Democratic primary when it began its relentless assault on Hillary Clinton. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz remarked months ago that the media chooses our presidents and clearly, if Obama wins, as is very likely at this point, we will have the media primarily to thank.

We also need to know that the liberal media – liberal that is in every way except for its rampant sexism and ageism – has been ably served in its obeisance to Obama by his thousands of youthful, white male supporters collectively known as the netroots who are frightening in their overwhelming viciousness toward any woman in a position of authority – they even compulsively trash Katie Couric.

And then there’s Moveon.Org, led by – you guessed it – a 27-year-old white male Obamaphile and described thusly in a Washington Post article today: “Although it's not a formal arm of the Democratic Party -- and the group doesn't rule out endorsing and financing third-party candidates -- MoveOn has become synonymous with the party's left wing.”

As I’ve said before, the left wing of the Democratic Party elite and their media allies in both the MSM and the blogosphere are driven by a pathological hatred of women, technically known as misogyny. And mark this: in its progressive disguise, the left is even more deadly than the extreme right.

To read more of WaPo’s article on MoveOn.Org, go here.

Echoes of Jimmy Carter in Obama’s Stirring Rhetoric

I’ve been watching CNN’s coverage of the Democratic convention and so far only one or two members of the best political team on television have made abusive, derogatory comments about Hillary Clinton and her followers and just for good measure, Bill Clinton.

I turned the volume on the TV down, took a deep breath, and returned to my keyboard to post a link to Sean Wilentz’s piece published at Newsweek. Wilentz, a Princeton historian, effectively assesses Obama’s failed attempts to launch a convincing campaign in the general election:

“Senator Obama's efforts to reinterpret the Democratic legacy have thus far amounted chiefly to promising a dramatic break with the status quo. His rhetoric of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ has thrilled millions of Democrats and helped secure the party's nomination. Yet millions of other Democrats still find his appeals wispy and unconvincing, and the persistent coolness within the ranks worries some party veterans. Democratic governors have already urged him to be more explicit about how he intends to adjust the party's principles to meet today's challenges.”

Wilenz calls our attention to the convergence of Obama’s rhetoric with this quote by Jimmy Carter:

"'Against this backdrop, how has the presumptive Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, proposed to revivify Democratic liberalism? There is a quotation that ought to give Democrats, and not just Democrats, pause: 'This year will not be a year of politics as usual. It can be a year of inspiration and hope, and it will be a year of concern, of quiet and sober reassessment of our nation's character and purpose. It has already been a year when voters have confounded the experts. And I guarantee you that it will be the year when we give the government of this country back to the people of this country. There is a new mood in America. We have been shaken by a tragic war abroad and by scandals and broken promises at home. Our people are searching for new voices and new ideas and new leaders.’

“Delivered in Obama's exhortatory cadences, the words are uplifting. The trouble is, though they seem to fit, the passage is from Carter's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in 1976.”

Wilentz concludes by asking a few tough questions:

“Can Obama, who lost the large industrial states in the primaries, deal with a troubled economy and become the standard bearer for the working and middle classes—the historic core of the Democratic Party that the last two Democratic candidates lost? Can the inexperienced candidate persuasively outline a new foreign policy that addresses the quagmires left by the Bush administration and faces the challenges of terrorism and a resurgent Russia? Can the less-than-one-term senator become the master of the Congress and enact goals such as universal health care that have eluded Democratic presidents since Truman? On these fundamental questions may hang the fate of Obama's candidacy. In the absence of a compelling record, set speeches, even with the most stirring words, will not resolve these matters. And until he resolves them, Obama will remain the most unformed candidate in the modern history of presidential politics.”

And this is where the Democrats are this evening as they kick off their convention in Denver with the media as usual sliming the Clintons and dissing Hillary’s supporters, while party hacks busily try to stifle any form of dissent in an already failed attempt to present a false sense of unity – democratic procedures be damned.

Read more.

Shades of the Democratic Primary: Obama Plays the Race Card - Again!

photo credits: AP

Clinton supporters are still shaking their heads in disbelief when recalling the several occasions when the Obama campaign or its supporters accused Bill and/or Hillary Clinton of racism – two political leaders with a long record of fighting for equal rights for women and minority groups. Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian, debunked these outrageous accusations by the Obama camp in an op-ed titled The Obama Team’s Strategic Use of the Race Card, published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Eventually, well after the damage was done, Obama publicly hung his head, apologized and admitted during a debate, “The Clintons are not racists.”

Lately, Obama has made several inflammatory remarks accusing the McCain campaign of racism. Jake Tapper in Political Punch at ABC News, has posted a piece titled Did Obama Accuse McCain of Running a Racist, Xenophobic Campaign? Tapper reports several incidents in which Obama has arguably played the race card in his campaign against John McCain.

Tapper begins by quoting Obama’s recent mention of race in his comments about his Republican opponent:

‘“John McCain right now, he's spending an awful lot of time talking about me,’ Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said today in Rolla, Mo. ‘You notice that? I haven’t seen an ad yet where he talks about what he’s gonna do. And the reason is because those folks know they don’t have any good answers, they know they’ve had their turn over the last eight years and made a mess of things. They know that you’re not real happy with them.’

“Obama continued: ‘And so the only way they figure they’re going to win this election is if they make you scared of me. So what they’re saying is, ‘Well, we know we’re not very good but you can’t risk electing Obama. You know, he’s new, he’s... doesn’t look like the other presidents on the currency, you know, he’s got a, he’s got a funny name.”’

Read more here.

The Obama Team’s Strategic Use of the Race Card

Sean Wilentz, the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus professor of history at Princeton University

Sean Wilentz, the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus professor of history at Princeton University, has exposed the Obama campaign’s strategy of playing the race card in this Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer.

Wilentz introduces his op-ed by explaining how Hillary Clinton chose to remain silent about the inflammatory sermons preached by Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright:

“Quietly, the storm over the hateful views expressed by Sen. Barack Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has blown away the most insidious myth of the Democratic primary campaign. Obama and his surrogates have charged that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has deliberately and cleverly played the race card in order to label Obama the "black" candidate.

“Having injected racial posturing into the contest, Obama's "post-racial" campaign finally seems to be all about race and sensational charges about white racism. But the mean-spirited strategy started even before the primaries began, when Obama's operatives began playing the race card - and blamed Hillary Clinton.

“Had she truly conspired to inflame racial animosities in January and February, her campaign would have brought up the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his incendiary sermons. But the Clinton campaign did not. And when the Wright stories and videos finally did break through in the mass media, they came not from Clinton's supporters but from Fox News Network.

“Although Wright had until recently been obscure to the American public, political insiders and reporters have long known about him. On March 6, 2007, the New York Times reported that Obama had disinvited Wright from speaking at his announcement because, as Wright said Obama told him, "You can get kind of rough in the sermons." By then, conservative commentators had widely denounced Wright. His performances in the pulpit were easily accessible on DVD, direct from his church. But Clinton, despite her travails, elected to remain silent.”

Wilentz then proceeds to debunk the Obama camp’s repeated efforts to smear the Clintons by injecting racism into the Democratic primary:

“Instead, she had to fight back against a deliberately contrived strategy to make her and her husband look like race-baiters. Obama's supporters and operatives, including his chief campaign strategist David Axelrod, seized on accurate and historically noncontroversial statements and supplied a supposedly covert racist subtext that they then claimed the calculating Clinton campaign had inserted.

“In December, Bill Shaheen, a Clinton campaign co-chair in New Hampshire, wondered aloud whether Obama's admitted youthful abuse of cocaine might hurt him in the general election. Obama's strategists insisted that Shaheen's mere mention of cocaine was suggestive and inappropriate - even though the scourge of cocaine abuse has long cut across both racial and class lines. Pro-Obama press commentators, including New York Times columnist Frank Rich, then whipped the story into a full racial subtext, charging that the Clintons had, in Rich's words, "ghettoized" Obama "into a cocaine user."

“The Obama campaign and its supporters pressed this strategy after Clinton's unexpected win in New Hampshire. Pundits partial to Obama, including Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post and John Nichols of the Nation, instantly mused that their candidate lost because of supposedly bigoted New Hampshire whites who had lied to pre-primary pollsters - an easily disproven falsehood that nevertheless gained currency in the media.

“Next morning, Obama's national co-chair, Jesse Jackson Jr., cast false and vicious aspersions about Hillary Clinton's famous emotional moment in New Hampshire as a measure of her deep racial insensitivity. "Her appearance brought her to tears," said Jackson, "not Hurricane Katrina."

“Obama's backers, including members of his official campaign staff, then played what might be called "the race-baiter card." Hillary Clinton, in crediting both Lyndon Johnson as well as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the Civil Rights Act in 1964, had supposedly denigrated King, and by extension Obama. Allegedly, Bill Clinton had dismissed Obama's victory in South Carolina by comparing it to those of the Rev. Jesse Jackson in the 1980s. (In fact, their electoral totals were comparable - and in the interview at issue, Clinton complimented Obama on his performance "everywhere" - a line the media usually omitted.)

“Thereafter, Obama's high command billowed further race-baiter allegations into the media. Pointing to the notoriously right-wing Drudge Report, Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe accused the Clinton campaign of deliberately leaking a supposedly racist photograph of Obama in African garb, which actually originated on still another right-wing Web site. Finally, David Axelrod trumpeted Geraldine Ferraro's awkward remarks in an obscure California newspaper as part of the Clinton campaign's "insidious pattern" of divisiveness.

“One pro-Obama television pundit, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, fulminated that the Clinton campaign had descended into the vocabulary of David Duke, former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

“(In his Philadelphia speech on race, Obama pressed the attack by three times likening Ferraro to Rev. Wright.)

“Since the Philadelphia speech, the candidate and his surrogates have sounded tone-deaf on the subject of race. On March 20, Obama described his Kansas grandmother to a Philadelphia radio interviewer as "a typical white person." The same day, Sen. John Kerry said that Obama would help U.S. relations with Muslim nations "because he's a black man." Another Obama supporter, Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, called him the first black leader "to come to the American people not as a victim but as a leader." Her history excluded and conceivably denigrated countless black leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Rep. John Lewis. Obama remained silent, refusing to take Kerry and McCaskill to task for their racially charged remarks.

“Neither candidate can win sufficient elected delegates in the remaining primaries to secure the nomination, and so the battle has moved to winning over the superdelegates. Obama's bogus "race-baiter" strategy is one of the main reasons he has come this far, and it is affecting the process now. But by deliberately inflaming the most destructive passions in American politics, the strategy has badly divided and confused Democrats, at least for the moment. And having done so, it may well doom the Democrats in the general election.”

Note: The HuffingtonPost, one of Obama’s chief megaphones on the Internet, is running a headline over a photo of Hillary today claiming her campaign can’t pay its bills. I didn’t read the article as most of Huffpost’s headlines about Hillary are misleading – the Huffpost is the online answer to the National Enquirer.

However, the first quarter ends tomorrow at midnight. I’ve donated twice to Hillary’s campaign this weekend, and I’m urging all of her supporters to do the same. The best way to thwart the well-oiled Obama machine is by helping Hillary level the financial playing field. With a level playing field, she’ll easily leave Obama in the dust.