Responding to Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman has an op-ed today that makes a couple of points defending Hillary Clinton and a couple of points questioning Barack Obama. As a dutiful Obama supporter, I'll try to make arguments against some of his points.

Mr. Obama was supposed to be a transformational figure, with an almost magical ability to transcend partisan differences and unify the nation.

This is the common misunderstanding of Obama's rhetoric when content is confused with process. When Obama talks about "transcending" partisan differences, it does not mean that somehow everyone will hew to the same ideological line, or that ideological differences will go away. Rather, it means that the process of politics will be executed in good faith, and that the opposition will have its voice be heard and not be shut out of the process, encouraging pragmatic resolutions to the immense problems our nation faces: the Iraq War, the upcoming recession, health care affordability, rising energy prices, global warming, terrorism, etc. There is nothing "magical" about any of this, and there is no rule that says that only Obama is capable of achieving it. Clinton could have chosen this route of conciliary and empathetic politics, but instead has opted for 90s-style ultra-partisan warfare politics and its incessant "fighting" of the "Republican machine". This difference in political methodologies between the candidates is a substantive one. As Clinton herself demonstrated in the early 1990s with the 'Hillarycare' debacle, the wrong political strategy can doom even the most well-thought-out policy.

Once voters got to know him — and once he had eliminated Hillary Clinton’s initial financial and organizational advantage — he was supposed to sweep easily to the nomination, then march on to a huge victory in November.

If the implication is that this was the Obama campaign's prediction of how things would go, then it is wrong. In fact, the Obama campaign has for a long time been soberly predicting that Obama's margin of victory would not be large and that there would be absolutely nothing easy about toppling the Clinton machine. So there is more humility to the Obama campaign, I think, than Krugman lets on.

Well, now he has an overwhelming money advantage and the support of much of the Democratic establishment — yet he still can’t seem to win over large blocs of Democratic voters, especially among the white working class.

As a result, he keeps losing big states.

It has always been predicted that Obama would lose big states such as Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (at around Super Tuesday, the Obama campaign itself predicted losses in these states by 4, 7, and 5 percent, respectively). This is part of the reason why Obama's campaign strategy has been to capitalize on lopsided margins in smaller states and/or caucus states where superior organization pays off.

And general election polls suggest that he might well lose to John McCain.

Tellingly, no citation. In the helpful metapoll over at RealClearPolitics, it shows that Obama is polling on average 1.5 points ahead of McCain, and Clinton is polling 0.6 ahead. In other words, even though the Democrats are currently campaigning against each other, they are both essentially in a dead heat with McCain (good news for Democrats). So I don't know where Krugman is getting his polling data from.

According to many Obama supporters, it’s all Hillary’s fault. If she hadn’t launched all those vile, negative attacks on their hero — if she had just gone away — his aura would be intact, and his mission of unifying America still on track.

But how negative has the Clinton campaign been, really? Yes, it ran an ad that included Osama bin Laden in a montage of crisis images that also included the Great Depression and Hurricane Katrina. To listen to some pundits, you’d think that ad was practically the same as the famous G.O.P. ad accusing Max Cleland of being weak on national security.

It wasn’t. The attacks from the Clinton campaign have been badminton compared with the hardball Republicans will play this fall. If the relatively mild rough and tumble of the Democratic fight has been enough to knock Mr. Obama off his pedestal, what hope did he ever have of staying on it through the general election?

I agree with Krugman that many Obama supporters overstate the damage done by Clinton's attacks, and tend to exaggerate the actual negativity of the ads themselves. At the same time, though, I don't think it makes sense to judge the negativity of Clinton's ads by using Republican attacks as a yardstick. Even if a Clinton attack is substantively less negative than a Republican one, the fact that it is uttered by a fellow Democrat can make it far more damaging. For example, the suggestion that Obama is less prepared to be President than John McCain is very damaging coming from the mouth of a leading Democrat, but is par for the course coming from a Republican.

Moreover, I think Krugman and Clinton supporters in general should be on guard against facile arguments of the type "what Clinton did was justified in the primary because Republicans will do the same thing in the general". To a certain extent it's fair--and in fact desired--for primary candidates to take off the gloves a little bit and go after each other's weak spots, especially the ones that will likely be exploited in the general election. Hillary's prevarications, Obama's preacher--bring it on. However, as I argue above, there are some attacks that cannot be made by Republicans, that can only inflict pain because they are uttered by Democrats. It doesn't make sense to say of these Democrat-on-Democrat attacks that they are some kind of precursor of what is to come in the general election, and therefore fair game.

[M]aybe his transformational campaign isn’t winning over working-class voters because transformation isn’t what they’re looking for.

From the beginning, I wondered what Mr. Obama’s soaring rhetoric, his talk of a new politics and declarations that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” (waiting for to do what, exactly?) would mean to families troubled by lagging wages, insecure jobs and fear of losing health coverage. The answer, from Ohio and Pennsylvania, seems pretty clear: not much. Mrs. Clinton has been able to stay in the race, against heavy odds, largely because her no-nonsense style, her obvious interest in the wonkish details of policy, resonate with many voters in a way that Mr. Obama’s eloquence does not.

I agree absolutely with Krugman: the majority of the sorts of "troubled" working-class families described above are going to favor Clinton's no-nonsense wonkish approach over Obama's admittedly airy-fairy rhetoric of "change" and "transcendence". No one's saying that Clinton doesn't have strengths--indeed, I think Obama has learned from Clinton that often times conveying wonkish competence and mastery of details can be more comforting than high-flying oratory. However, just because these voters prefer Clinton to Obama does not mean that they will prefer McCain to Obama. If these voters are really as policy and detail minded as Krugman suggests, then they will certainly choose any Democrat over any Republican in the general, come what may. The same is not necessarily true, however, for many Independents and new voters who do respond to Obama's soaring oratory--which is why I think Obama is better positioned than Clinton to win the general election in November.

Tellingly, the Obama campaign has put far more energy into attacking Mrs. Clinton’s health care proposals than it has into promoting the idea of universal coverage.

During the closing days of the Pennsylvania primary fight, the Obama campaign ran a TV ad repeating the dishonest charge that the Clinton plan would force people to buy health insurance they can’t afford. It was as negative as any ad that Mrs. Clinton has run — but perhaps more important, it was fear-mongering aimed at people who don’t think they need insurance, rather than reassurance for families who are trying to get coverage or are afraid of losing it.

To say that Obama "has put far more energy" into attacking Clinton than promoting universal coverage is, I think, an obvious exaggeration. But I do agree that the particular attack ad that Krugman refers to was an inexcusable misrepresentation of Clinton's health care proposals, and should never have been run.

The question Democrats, both inside and outside the Obama campaign, should be asking themselves is this: now that the magic has dissipated, what is the campaign about? More generally, what are the Democrats for in this election?

That should be an easy question to answer. Democrats can justly portray themselves as the party of economic security, the party that created Social Security and Medicare and defended those programs against Republican attacks — and the party that can bring assured health coverage to all Americans.

They can also portray themselves as the party of prosperity: the contrast between the Clinton economy and the Bush economy is the best free advertisement that Democrats have had since Herbert Hoover.

But the message that Democrats are ready to continue and build on a grand tradition doesn’t mesh well with claims to be bringing a “new politics” and rhetoric that places blame for our current state equally on both parties.

I think the Democratic candidate will be able to portray him or herself and the party in all the ways Krugman wants them to be portrayed, whether it's Obama or Clinton. What we're seeing here is the kind of myopia and cognitive dissonance that the long and bitter primary tends to cause amongst Democrats: we tend to lose sight of the fact that both candidates--though different in their political styles and what they emphasize--are overwhelmingly more the same than different, with almost no significant policy differences between them. Moreover, there is no tension between Obama's project of a "new politics" and the idea of building on "a grand tradition" of the Democratic Party, so long as we remember to distinguish between the content of policy proposals (which build on tradition) and the process of getting those policies passed into law (which requires "new politics").

So I think Krugman's criticisms of Obama are overblown. On the other hand, I'm also sympathetic to the article in general: with Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, and even David Brooks cheerleading for Obama week in and week out and bashing Clinton, a Clinton supporter like Krugman must feel obligated to balance out the scales a little bit on the NYT op-ed pages.