Giving Up on Bipartisanship

Paul Krugman wrote an Op-Ed last Thursday, Republican Death Trip. He talks about how Obama is dealing with his failure to move us past partisanship.

"Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex. This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing."

Krugman said it again on MSNBC “you can’t actually satisfy the crazies by trying to offer substantive concessions” and Mathew Yglesias comments in , The Trouble With Appeasement.

On Friday, Krugman wrote Journamalism. "This gets at one of my biggest gripes: reporting that focuses on the political game without ever informing readers or viewers about the actual facts." I note that in these articles Krugman is careful to point out which statements are true and which are false and I really appreciate that.

He gives an example that he looked into. My experience in 1996 while looking through all the Boston Globe articles on the governor election the weekend before the voting. I looked through over 100 articles from over the course of the campaign and only three were on the issues. The others were on speeches or reviews of their TV ads. That convinced me that reading the news everyday was a waste of time and I started getting most of my news from weekly magazines.

J. Bradford DeLong takes it to heart in writing Why Orrin Hatch Lies a Lot (and Pete Domenici, Bob Dole, and Chuck Grassley too). He refers to a previous Krugman debate on bipartisanship. "Once the parties realigned, zero-sum partisan loyalties would dominate: Republicans like Hatch would think hard whether it was more important to vote for a bill because it was good for America or vote against it because then you could paint the Democratic president as a failure and pick up seats in the next election, and make their decision."