Krugman, Klein, and Getting It Wrong

Surprise, surprise:  Naomi Klein writes a piece for The Nation complaining that Obama has spoken in support of capitalism.  Hillary backer Paul Krugman, who didn't originally dislike Obama but has been attacking Obama's campaign since they dared to backtalk him on health care (and who has been rumored for months now to have been promised a plum post if Hillary became president), is still nursing his grudge and shows it in a gloating nyahh-nyahh-told-ya-so reply to Klein.

The funny thing is that neither Klein nor Krugman are exactly 100% in the right on this.  Follow me across the jump for (cue Paul Harvey voice) The Rest Of The Story.

First of all, let's look at Klein's piece.  

It's already attracted attention because, for a piece as short as it is, it manages to include two key points that are at best questionable (and at worst passing on an old and debunked story).  From the letters column attached to the article:

I am  troubled by Naomi Klein's continuation of the NAFTA rumor. Obama's web site addresses this issue here.

Canadian Embassy Has Denied The Report. "A spokesman for the Canadian Embassy to the United States, Tristan Landry, flatly denied the CTV report that a senior Obama aide had told the Canadian ambassador not to take seriously Obama's denunciations of Nafta..."

"The news reports on Obama's position on NAFTA are inaccurate and in no way represent Senator Obama’s consistent position on trade. When Senator Obama says that he will forcefully act to make NAFTA a better deal for American workers, he means it."

So why continue this inaccurate or unverifiable rumor as fact?

     

Timothy J. Wright

     

<h3>Chicago, <abbr>IL</abbr></h3>
06/15/2008 @ 5:47pm

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I really disagree with Naomi Klein's assessment of Jason Furman. Furman's pick gives me confidence in Obama's abilities to pick great people.

I had the privilege of taking a Macroeconomics course with Jason Furman at Columbia University. He is a brilliant man and a great teacher, who explains economic concepts clearly and usefully. Obama should consider himself lucky to have someone of Furman's caliber on his team.

My Microeconomics professor, Richard Robb, was also from the University of Chicago, and is also brilliant. Neither of these two men are caught up in some Milton Friedman cult. They are both progressive in outlook and orientation. They both clearly understand economics. The law of supply and demand works whether you are conservative, liberal, socialist, whether you want it to work, whether you don't want it to work.

I find the Furman appointment reassuring, and I'm someone who regularly criticizes Obama from the left.

Dan Wentzel
Santa Monica, CA
06/13/2008 @ 10:42pm

As for whether the company Obama keeps makes him a hyperconservative, another letter writer sarcastically points out that two well-known lefty economists -- people who make Paul Krugman, who used to work for Ronald Reagan, look downright fascistic -- have endorsed Barack Obama:

Yup, Obama's a real conservative alright--so much so that he invited Joseph Stiglitz to be one of his advisers. Stiglitz turned him down, but he and fellow liberal economist Edmund Phelps endorsed Obama back in April.

Meanwhile, John McCain's advisers include Arthur "Laffer Curve" Laffer, Carly "trash two corporations, get platinum parachute" Fiorina and Phil "Just Eeeewww" Gramm.

     

Tamara Baker

     

<h3>St. Paul, <abbr>MN</abbr></h3>
06/17/2008 @ 7:46pm

Yes, it's true:  Joe Stiglitz and Edmund Phelps have endorsed Obama -- and Stiglitz was asked by Obama to join his administration.  Stiglitz turned him down, but not because he didn't like the man:

Stiglitz has been approached by Barack Obama as a possible adviser should he reach the White House, although he says, "I've gone beyond the age where I would want to be in Washington full time. I would be interested in trying to help shape the bigger picture issues, and in particular the issues associated with America positioning itself in the new global world, and re-establishing the bonds with other countries that have been so damaged by the Bush administration."

I suggest, as devil's advocate, that to count costs in the way he has, and to advise retrenchment, might be seen as encouraging America to return to isolationism. "No. I think that's fundamentally wrong. The problem with Iraq was that it was the wrong war, and the wrong set of issues. Obama was very good about this. He said, 'I'm not against war - I'm just against stupid wars.' And I feel very much the same way. While we were worried about WMD that did not exist in Iraq, WMD did occur in North Korea. To use an American expression, we took our eye off the ball. And while we were fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan got worse, Pakistan got worse. So because we were fighting battles that we couldn't win, we lost battles that we could have." To discover that those lost battles included better healthcare for millions of Americans, a robust world economy, a healthier and more independent Africa, and a more stable Middle East, seems worth a bit of green-eye-shaded number crunching.

Now, Klein herself isn't a professional economist, so I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt for not knowing that the two most renowned progressive economists alive have backed Obama, as have many other economists (which compares favorably with the list of economists who back McCain).  But Paul Krugman knows -- and not just because lots of people have e-mailed him with the information, either.  As a professional economist himself, he can't escape knowing this -- especially since Krugman has a dog in this fight, if not actual skin in the game in the form of a promised Cabinet post or other presidential appointment.

Then again, this isn't the first time that Krugman's left out pertinent information from a column dealing with the 2008 presidential race.  He managed to write a long screed that rightly denounced McCain's gas-tax holiday scam, but failed to note that Hillary Clinton backed McCain's plan (her one major departure from the McCain plan was to suggest that it be financed by a windfall-profits tax, which ignores the fact that the recent attempts to put such a tax through Congress, including the one made less than two weeks ago, have gone down in defeat).  After his hypocrisy was pointed out to him, he did, grudgingly, give Hillary Clinton a slap on the wrist, but did so in a column where he came down harder on his fellow economists (many of whom, as noted earlier, back Obama) than on her.

UPDATE:  Aprichard reminds us that earlier this month, Krugman had in fact defended Jason Furman against claims of his being too conservative.   Funnily enough, just as he didn't initially mention that Hillary Clinton backed the McCain gas-tax holiday pander that he rightly attacked,  he doesn't mention his defense of Furman when he tweaks Naomi Klein over her Obama piece -- even though one of the key (and mistaken) points of her piece, as noted above, was that Furman is allegedly very conservative.