Paul Krugman says Barack Obama's take on the housing crisis is "cautious and relatively orthodox." Bob Kuttner says, in effect, wtf Paul? I don't really want to get in the middle of the two of them, but it's worth saying that Krugman seems to be focusing more on the policies Obama has laid out, while Kuttner is more interested in Obama's diagnosis of the problem. So far as I can tell, Obama and Clinton are quite close in their policies, but Obama offers a much more holistic, regulation-centric explanation that situates the crisis in the long struggle of progressives to keep control of an amoral and often rapacious market. So, uh, both these powerful, important, handsome economic writers are correct! Update: Jared Bernstein comes down in Obama's defense. I think the important point here is that basically everyone agrees that Obama and Clinton have very good diagnoses of the problem and quite good plans to address it. Similarly, everyone agrees that McCain has a superficial -- at best -- grasp of the problem and no real plans to address it.
