The Krugman Game

The Krugman game is, of course, where you read Paul Krugman's latest column, and try to see where the swipe at Obama will come from. Before Edwards dropped out, it tended to alternate between praising Edwards and hitting Obama, but now it's all Obama. Of course, columns explicitly about Obama or the presidential race are disqualified. Today's column on the financial markets is a great one for the game -- manages to do it without mentioning the candidates once:

Nobody wants to put taxpayers on the hook for the financial industry’s follies; we can all hope that, in the end, a bailout won’t be necessary. But hope is not a plan.

Brilliant, in its way. In fairness to Krugman, I love it when he does this with Bush -- the column that starts out discussing some massive economic problem and then neatly relates it back to some combination of Bush Administration incompetence and malfeasance. And also in fairness to Krugman, he's been very clear on the need to fight back against what he considers to be the fundamentally undemocratic conservative movement (undemocratic because it doesn't recognize the legitimacy of the government it's trying to take over), and he isn't happy with Obama's rhetoric. What he seems to be ignoring is that Obama is not to the right of Clinton on almost any policy issue, and that it doesn't hurt to have a candidate who at least talks the talk of national unity. Krugman's lesson from Bush seems to have been that candidates with talk of bipartisanship shouldn't be trusted, but maybe it should be that, regardless of your ideology, you should talk about bipartisanship because that's what Americans like to hear.