Why the N.Y. Times ruins Bush's breakfast

Columnist Paul Krugman is W's worst nightmare -- a brilliant economist who meticulously exposes the White House's rigged numbers and lies.

By Scott Rosenberg

Sep 8, 2003 | The economist who can write engagingly about his discipline is a rare bird, prized by editors everywhere. When the New York Times brought Paul Krugman onboard at the turn of the millennium as on Op-Ed columnist, the move seemed like a no-brainer: Capitalism had won the global contest of the Cold War, the nation sat at the pinnacle of a vast financial boom, and stock tips were being traded at supermarket checkout lines. The Times feared being left in the gray dust by the colorful frenzy of the hyperventilating new economy -- but didn't want to be seen as cheerleading for it, either. Its only competitor for the title of National Newspaper for the Only Global Superpower was the Wall Street Journal. So a levelheaded but open-minded economist-skeptic like Krugman seemed to be just what the Times needed.

Within a couple of years, that new economy lay six feet under the dirt of a new recession, federal surpluses had turned into ominous new deficits, 9/11 had shattered the Pax Americana -- and Paul Krugman had become the most devastatingly precise voice of liberal outrage in American journalism. The Times' dismal scientist had swallowed a passion pill and turned into a partisan scrapper.

Krugman's evolution naturally enraged critics from the right, who had for decades carped about the Times' supposed liberal bent but who had actually benefited from a long-standing tilt in its columnist roster: The liveliest, feistiest voice on its Op-Ed page had always belonged to conservative William Safire. Whatever you might think of his views, Safire actually seemed to be having fun writing -- unlike his colleagues to the left, more droning, dutiful writers like Anthony Lewis and Bob Herbert. Once Krugman joined Frank Rich (who has since left his Op-Ed perch for the Sunday Arts and Leisure section), the Times finally had an Op-Ed page worthy of the charge of liberal bias.

And just in the nick of time. Because the era in which Krugman honed his voice was also the era in which -- as he outlines in the introduction to his new book, "The Great Unraveling" -- American conservatives seized control of the U.S. government and, under cover of a rhetoric of "compassion," remade the nation's finances, laws and foreign policy with unprecedented ideological zeal and putschlike audacity. If that description of recent history sounds like a hysterical overstatement, you haven't been reading Krugman's columns, and the arrival of "The Great Unraveling" offers you a great opportunity to catch up.

The bad news first: "The Great Unraveling" is mostly a collection of Krugman's Times pieces, and if you have been reading them all along, there isn't a whole lot new here. (Herewith, as befits discussion of an economist's book, the statistics: Only 49 of the 423 pages -- including the preface -- are new material. That's 11.6 percent of total verbiage.) For reasons that must have looked good in the warm glow of a book proposal, Krugman has wrenched his original columns out of their chronological context and into thematic chapters. This has two unfortunate side effects: First, it draws attention to Krugman's occasional repetition of insights, turns of phrase and even jokes ("I am not making this up"; "I've reported, you decide"). In a regularly appearing newspaper column, such tropes can have the salutary impact of musical leitmotifs; between hardcovers, they just sound awry.

More important, organizing these columns by theme rather than timeline dilutes the dramatic arc of the evolution in Krugman's thinking. During the 2000 election, the economist took pains to explain the bogus math behind Bush's Social Security privatization plan; after the election, he patiently laid out the inequities inherent in Bush's tax cut plan and exposed the double talk employed by its advocates. In those days Krugman's tone was one of detached disbelief: They can't be serious. Surely, once people understand the facts, the nation will come to its senses. Over time, as the aftermath of 9/11 cast a pseudo-heroic penumbra around the once-feckless president and the "war on terror" provided him with myriad opportunities to slip pet policies into action, Krugman's detachment wore down -- Oh, hell, they are serious, and the facts aren't sticking -- and his tone shifted to engaged outrage.

The rhetoric grew angrier -- like this, from a February 2003 column, one of the most recent in the collection: "Although financial reporters have started to realize that Mr. Bush is out of control ... the sheer banana-republic irresponsibility of his plans hasn't been widely appreciated." And the old assumption that everyone will somehow wake up from this bad dream has evaporated from Krugman's worldview, leaving only a sense that we have made some truly colossal bad choices that will take generations to fix.

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