Krugman vs. Herbert (also reality)

Krugman is on fire these days. Here's his latest column, in which he attacks Obama's "bitter" remarks from the "left," claiming that Obama's analysis of religious-economic links is flawed. But then he hits his own downfall when he says that, rather than religion being a tool for the Republicans, some say:

the shift of the Solid South from Democratic to Republican control in the wake of the civil rights movement” explains all — literally all — of the Republican success story.

Huh. So you think maybe race is one reason some people won't vote for Obama? I wonder if that would be a touchy topic. Let's go to Obama's words:

. . . they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment . . .

See what he did there? "antipathy to people who aren't like them . . ." Maybe, just maybe Obama was trying to say, as delicately as possible, that some of these voters are racist. It's a topic he really doesn't like discussing, because it's been used by the Clinton campaign (see: Ferraro, Rendell, et al) to raise doubts about his electability, and it's just not something that needs to be in the national consciousness, but when he's directly asked, by a group of supporters, "Why can't some Pennsylvania voters be won over?" he tries to say, maybe it's race.

Now, this point of view is not original. For instance, Bob Herbert's last column, appearing on the very same page Krugman's column does in the NY times, said:

Maybe Barack Obama felt he couldn’t afford to give the correct answer. . . it’s pretty widely understood that a substantial number of those voters . . . will not vote for a black candidate for president

So has Krugman suddenly become blind to race? What's going on here? If you want to criticize Obama from the left, you have to acknowledge what he was really talking about. And what he was really talking about is real, and no matter how mangled or incorrect his formulation, you have to acknowledge that. Which Krugman never did.