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Isaac Chotiner gets a little confused about Paul Krugman's column today about the left and Obama. First, the Krugman passage in question:
And then there’s the matter of the banks.I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing. But I’ve had many conversations with people who voted for Mr. Obama, yet dismiss the stimulus as a total waste of money. When I press them, it turns out that they’re really angry about the bailouts rather than the stimulus — but that’s a distinction lost on most voters.Isaac says, "Krugman is conflating a bunch of different things here. Is he saying that people would be more pro-stimulus if the administration had been tougher with the banks?"Now, I'll concede that this paragraph is a bit incongruous in an article ostensibly about the public option, but even as the public option has become more of a signifier for a "progressive" health care bill than anything else, this column is talking about a larger problem: How the administration has lost touch with both left public opinion and, more broadly, with public opinion in general. Finding people who don't understand the distinction Krugman refers to is a common occurrence for any of us who report on the stimulus or the bailouts; people really don't understand the differences between the two programs, or that more money has been spent to help regular people in this economy than to fix the banks. But the symbolism of "bailout culture" has overwhelmed the administration's more populist policy choices, and Krugman's point is that a heavier-handed approach to the banks might have helped with this problem of perception. More broadly, displaying a willingness to take on entrenched interests directly would incline the public, and the left, to trust the administration more in health care negotiations. Isaac goes on to note his surprise that Krugman is "displaying sympathy for voters who are completely clueless. ... When people are completely uninformed about policy, following their lead is probably not the wisest course." Well, doye, I guess. Krugman never says that public opinion should be the guide to financial policy, and when he does make arguments about policy, he makes them with a lot of expertise and empirical data. But this wasn't a column about policy; it's a column about politics, and I'm not sure he can be faulted for taking public opinion into account.
-- Tim Fernholz
