The Deflationist --- How Paul Krugman found politics.

[Blue_Tires]

When it is cold at home, or he has a couple of weeks with nothing to do but write his Times column, or when something unexpectedly stressful happens, like winning the Nobel Prize, the Princeton economist Paul Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, go to St. Croix. Here it is warm, and the days are longer, and the phone doesn’t ring much. Here they live in a one-bedroom condo they bought a few years ago, nothing fancy but right on the beach. The condo’s walls are yellow and blue, the furniture is made of wicker, there are pillows and seashells. There are tall, sprawling bougainvillea bushes along the side of the road.

“We first fell in love with St. John,” Krugman says. “It was New York lawyers who’d decided to give up on the whole thing and live on a houseboat and wear their gray ponytails.”

“But St. John went too upscale,” Wells says.

“Our complex is more Midwesterners. Retired car dealers and so on.”

The east end of St. Croix is something of a tourist spot, but the west end, where they decided to settle, is where the Crucians live, and it has a Jimmy Buffett feel to it that they like. In Frederiksted, the west end’s tiny town, there are a couple of coffee shops, a KFC, a Wendy’s, a few churches, a post office, and a promenade by the sea with concrete picnic tables. Not many people about. Farther out along the coast, there are beach bars with plastic chairs and Christmas lights, men with beards and very tanned middle-aged women sitting and smoking in the afternoon.

“The west end is where the whites who’ve gone native live,” Wells says. “They have a couple of beach bars with not very good blues and jazz bands. They were playing Neil Young as we went by the other night, and Paul said, ‘Boy, that was an awful rendition.’ ”

“It was Buffalo Springfield.”

“Yes, Springfield, O.K. I said, ‘Aging boomers, they love any rendition, no matter how bad.’ ”

Here Krugman wears the same shirt for days, a short-sleeved plaid cotton shirt, and bathing trunks. He sits in the room where they eat their breakfast, which has a long window open to the sea. He types at a tiny table that folds out of a closet, which requires him to sit more or less inside the closet, but this is helpful, because the light can be so bright in the room that it becomes blinding. If he turns his head, he can see the sky.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/01/100301fa_fact_macfarquhar#ixzz0hCCbMPSa

[tom_paine]

1. Excellent, if long, article - many DUers will see themselves in Krugman's gradual realizations

[depakid]

2. Some may want to look back on this part:

<His wife said> ‘You know, life after Bush is going to be different; you won’t be everybody’s darling, because it will be a more sane time.’ ”

In fact, the change came faster than either of them had anticipated, because during the primary campaign Krugman was very critical of Barack Obama. He was critical chiefly because, of the three main candidates, Obama seemed to him the most conservative (his health plan, for instance, didn’t mandate universal coverage), but it wasn’t just his policies that Krugman objected to. He couldn’t stand all the feel-good stuff about hope and dialogue and reconciliation.

He hated that Obama was out there saying nice things about Reagan when what Democrats needed to do most was debunk the persistent myth that Reaganomics had been good for America. He thought Obama was completely wrong to believe that the country’s problems were due largely to partisan nastiness, and ridiculously naïve to imagine that he could bring together Republicans and insurance companies to reform health care. “Anyone who thinks that the next president can achieve real change without bitter confrontation is living in a fantasy world,” he wrote in 2007.

Krugman supported John Edwards, for his emphasis on poverty, for his ambitious health-care plan, and for his rough talk about attacking the interests of the wealthy. After Edwards dropped out, he supported Hillary Clinton. She wasn’t as left as Edwards was, but at least she was a fighter, and she obviously had no illusions about bipartisan harmony.

But most people didn’t see Obama the way Krugman did; they thought he was the savior of the left, and the passions of the campaign were such that when Krugman wrote columns deriding Obama he was lacerated—scathing comments on the progressive blogs, more hate mail, and not the fun kind. “I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here,” Krugman wrote. “The Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.”

“OK, you did it,” one commenter wrote in response. “You lost me. I’ve defended you on local blogs but you’ve sunk into low territory.” “You’re devolving into a caricature with your gross misrepresentations and strident, ignorant defense of the Clinton campaign,” another wrote. “Paul, you’re killing a little bit of your readers’ souls,” a third wrote, “or at least those of us who used to love your column.” “The primary was terrible, it was awful,” Krugman says.

“Paul was getting attacked by people we thought of as on our side,” Wells says. “I thought to myself, Well, I knew things were going to change, but this is quick and hard enough to give you whiplash. One of our friends said, ‘You’d better be careful, because Obama supporters might put rattlesnakes in your mailbox.’

[phantom power]

3. I keep thinking about FDR speech at Madison Square Garden

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred.

http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/text/us/fdr1936.html

If Obama has a tragic flaw, it would be that he seems to really want everybody to like him. And each other.

[Doctor_J]

4. I supported Obama because I believed him to be MORE of a fighter

than HRC. I salute Krugman for figuring it out long before I did.