November 2003 Archive

However, conservatives eager to take political advantage of Kennedy's comment have insinuated that it was directed specifically at those nominees who are women or racial and ethnic minorities, although there is no indication that this is the case. (To date, six of Bush's nominees have been filibustered - two white men, two white women, one African American woman and one Latino man [Miguel Estrada, whose nomination was later withdrawn].)

Among several conservative commentators who were specifically criticized, Mr. Nyhan pointed to Lying in Ponds pundit Thomas Sowell:

This is an extension of the strategy various Republicans have employed of accusing Democrats of being, as the Washington Post reported, "anti-Catholic, anti-South and anti-Hispanic" for opposing various judicial nominations, reversing charges of bigotry and discrimination that have mostly been leveled by Democrats in the past. Recently, syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell picked up on this tactic, claiming a "lynch mob atmosphere" has "prevailed during confirmation hearings for judges." . . .

Mr. Sowell wrote four consecutive columns on the subject: October 21, October 22, October 24 and October 28.

[permanent link]

Mr Krugman wages, and always has waged, intellectual thermonuclear war against all whom he regards as denizens of the pit and carriers of error. He's usually right (80% of the time?); he's sometimes wrong. The interesting question--which you did not pose--is what has the Bush administration done over the past three years to draw such a concentration of Mr Krugman's intellectual fire? It is odd that you name only one critic, lyinginponds.com, but mention unnamed "people" and "critics" who "cannot all be easily dismissed"?, "game theorists" who were "not convince[d]", "fellow economists, jealous". Perhaps this is because laudably you do not want to give public prominence to unbalanced loons.

The above is a portion of the letter as edited by The Economist; in the original letter Mr. DeLong elaborated on Lying in Ponds: ". . lyinginponds.com website proprietor Ken Waight (who seems not to know that in the past Krugman's harsh criticisms have been directed against Democrats as well as Republicans)."

Of course Mr. Krugman's past criticism of Democrats has been mentioned many times on this site: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and as recently as two days ago. Mr. Krugman may have been the very model of non-partisanship in the 90's, but relying on these past glories seems a bit like claiming that George W. Bush is a "uniter, not a divider" because of his reported cooperation with Texas Democrats in the 90's. Mr. Bush has been the president for almost three years now -- isn't there ample recent evidence of uniting or dividing which is far more relevant? Mr. Krugman has written two columns each week for The New York Times for almost four years, including the final year of the Clinton administration, covering topics from elections in France to the space program. In response to readers' comments, I've tediously gone through all 372 of Mr. Krugman's Times columns, looking for "harsh criticisms . . directed against Democrats", but have been simply unable to find a column which consists mainly of substantive and unambiguous criticism directed at Bill Clinton or Al Gore or Terry McAuliffe or Tom Daschle or Al Sharpton or Howard Dean or Gray Davis or any other Democrat. That distinguishes Mr. Krugman from fellow left-leaning pundits such as Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Bob Herbert, Michael Kinsley, Thomas Oliphant, Mary McGrory, Helen Thomas, and even Robert Scheer and Molly Ivins, all of whom have found occasions to substantively criticize their own party in only the last couple of years. How many "crossover columns" would an ideologically strident but truly independent columnist write out of 372 opportunities? I don't know, but certainly far more than zero.

I believe that Mr. DeLong knows Paul Krugman personally, so he may have perfectly valid reasons to trust in his friend's non-partisanship which I can't see. My only basis for evaluation is the record of 372 Times columns, and I would argue that they were written by a gifted economist and lively writer who also happens to be extremely partisan. I've said many times before that I believe that the partisanship scores of Democratic pundits will naturally be systematically higher during a controversial Republican administration such as this one, and that I hope to be still doing Lying in Ponds the next time that the administration changes parties, to observe how Mr. Krugman and others respond. To me, the most amazing thing about the current partisanship scoring is that Ann Coulter is ranked as the most partisan, despite the lack of high profile Democratic targets in the White House. One can only imagine how high her partisanship score will go when a Democrat regains the presidency.

[permanent link]

Here then is Paul Krugman's 2001 page, which may be compared with similar pages for 2000, 2002 and his current page for 2003. His Combined Partisanship Index for 2001 was 78, extremely high compared to almost all other pundits evaluated here, and very similar to 2002 and 2003. Here is a brief analysis:

1. The most striking trend in the Krugman record is the almost total disappearance of "non-political" columns, those with no references at all to parties or politicians. As the figure below shows, Mr. Krugman wrote 52 such columns in his first year at the Times, mostly concerning economics. With only two non-political columns this year, it's clear that his writing has become mostly polemical, and I would argue, extremely partisan.

   

2. 2001 was the year in which Mr. Krugman's controversial views on the cause of the California energy crisis were substantially vindicated, demonstrating the value of having an award-winning economist writing about economic issues with depth and understanding.
3. I've argued previously that much can be learned from the reaction of various pundits to political scandals, particularly those which reflect badly on their own parties. Paul Krugman is an excellent example -- he pounded relentlessly on Republicans involved in the Enron scandal in 2002 (saying that "I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society."), yet gave a pass to Democrats involved in similar financial shenanigans, unlike the far more balanced treatment of his colleague Frank Rich. Even a non-economic Republican scandal such as the Trent Lott affair in 2002 received unusually intense coverage from Mr. Krugman, who predicted that Mr. Lott would get a "slap on the wrist" but remain in his position of Senate leadership. Yet the 2001 record shows that Mr. Krugman responded very differently when confronted with a Democratic scandal. The Marc Rich pardon controversy which arose as Bill Clinton left office in 2001 didn't merit a single mention, despite criticism from across the political spectrum. The point is not that Mr. Krugman must write about every scandal with equal intensity, but that the partisan pattern over several years is obvious -- he showers attention on stories negative to Republicans, while virtually ignoring those negative to Democrats.
4. I would argue that a columnist most clearly displays their intellectual independence when they are willing to sit down and write an entire column which unambiguously either criticizes their own party or praises the other. For columnists with the highest partisanship scores, these kind of substantive "crossover columns" are very rare. Ann Coulter, for example, has had no crossover columns this year, and the few columns in 2002 which criticized the Bush administration were aimed mostly at Norman Mineta, probably not coincidentally the only Democrat in the Bush cabinet. Substantive crossover columns have been nonexistent in the four years of Mr. Krugman's Times punditry. Of the 371 columns Mr. Krugman has written, only three were scored as nominally leaning toward Republicans, two in 2001. One such column has a single, offhand negative reference to Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, and the other had positive Republican references to both Gordon Smith and Rudolph Giuliani, but the column was actually aimed at the head of the nominally-nonpartisan Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (coming in under the Lying in Ponds radar, not counted as partisan references), and "the indifference of his superiors". The sheer difficulty of writing 371 consecutive columns without a single substantive crossover column can hardly be overemphasized -- not a single column devoted to criticism, however mild, of Bill Clinton or Al Gore or Howard Dean or Al Sharpton or any other Democrat -- not a single column devoted to praise, however mild, of Colin Powell or John McCain or any other Republican. Mr. Krugman's colleagues at the Times, Maureen Dowd and William Safire, are sometimes criticized as partisan, yet it's easy to find columns in which they cross partisan lines. It's revealing that defenders of Mr. Krugman invariably point to his Democratic criticism in the early years of the Clinton administration, nearly a decade ago.

I can't do any better than The Economist, in a current article which links to Lying in Ponds, in describing the great strengths and weaknesses of Paul Krugman:

What is beyond dispute is that Mr Krugman is the finest economist to become a media superstar -- at least since Milton Friedman or, earlier, John Maynard Keynes turned to journalism. Mr Krugman's work on currency crises and international trade is widely admired by other economists. He holds the John Bates Clark medal in economics, which is slightly harder to get than a Nobel prize. As for popularity, his new book, "The Great Unravelling" -- his eighth aimed at a broad, non-academic readership -- has spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

The Economist, which itself has been known on occasion to clamber off the economic fence, can hardly criticise anybody for writing hard-hitting (yet engaging and accessible!) economic analyses. But, increasingly, people are asking whether Mr Krugman's success as a journalist is now coming at the expense of, rather than as the result of, his economics. For while he has had some journalistic coups during his time as a columnist -- most notably in recognising, long before most other commentators, that market manipulation played a role in the California energy crisis -- perhaps the most striking thing about his writing these days is not its economic rigour but its political partisanship.

The myth, spawned by Robert Scheer in May 2001 and widely repeated since, suggests that the United States gave $43 million in aid directly to the Taliban in 2001 as a reward for the government's ban on opium poppy cultivation. In fact, the $43 million was given to food aid and food security programs administered through non-governmental organizations and the United Nations to help relieve famine in Afghanistan. The myth was debunked at the time by Leftwatch.com and later by us. However, the Taliban's relevance after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks sparked a surge of repetitions, which we and others have continued to debunk.

CHENEYWORLD: With her column last week, "Their Master's Voice", New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd continues to discuss Dick Cheney far more often than any other Lying in Ponds pundit:

Dick Cheney's dry Wyoming voice has the same effect on some male Republicans, starting at the very top, and even some journalists, that a high-pitched whistle has on a dog. How else to explain the vice president's success in creating a parallel universe inside the White House that is shaping the real universe?

With the ten negative references in that column, Ms. Dowd has mentioned the word "Cheney" 81 times in columns this year (no nickname yet). E.J. Dionne is next with only 31 Cheney references.

[permanent link]

MORAL POLITICS: My colleague Andrew Cline praises George Lakoff's book Moral Politics so frequently that I finally had to give in a while back and read it. There are many things in the book which I don't agree with, but I do agree with Andrew that Mr. Lakoff's central thesis is right on target -- that most of the differences between liberals and conservatives can be understood as resulting from two competing moral worldviews, which he calls "Strict Father Morality" (conservatives) and "Nurturant Parent Morality" (liberals):

. . . So far as I can tell, the main issue in every conservative political policy is morality -- good versus evil. There is nothing surprising in this. Conservatives consider themselves moral people and they talk about morality and the family constantly. But to liberals, who have their own very different moral system, conservative policies are so immoral that any conservative discussion of morality is taken as demagoguery.

Of course, liberals also see their policies as moral and their overall politics as serving moral goals. Conservatives, however, talk as if liberals were degenerates opposed to morality; as if they were corrupted by special interests; as if they loved expensive and inefficient bureaucracy; as if they wanted to take away the rights of citizens. Each side sees the other as immoral, corrupt, and lunkheaded. Neither side wants to see the other as moral in any way. Neither side wants to recognize that there are two, opposed, highly-structured, well-grounded, widely accepted, and utterly contradictory moral systems at the center of American politics.

The failure to see that politics is fundamentally about morality demeans American politics. It makes all politicians look immoral. And it hides the deep logic behind political positions.

I raise these points because in the amazing journey that is Mary McGrory's life, this is a bittersweet week. Tomorrow night, in New York, she will be given the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism, but amid the laudatory words and the applause a sad reality will come clear. Mary fell ill in March, and eight months later she's yet to fully recover. Barring a breakthrough, she's probably written the last of her syndicated columns, ending one of the most important, colorful, and enduring newspaper careers that the American public has had the pleasure to read.

An account of the award ceremony, which includes further details on her health, appears in this morning's Washington Post. The Post also offers an address for anyone who wishes to write to Ms. McGrory.

[permanent link]

Krugman did plead guilty to one of Luskin's charges -- partisanship. "I think it's pretty clear that I'm not going to be voting Republican in 2004, and it's pretty clear that Bill Safire isn't going to be voting Democratic," he said. (Luskin, a registered libertarian, won't be voting either party.)

TWO COLUMN MINIMUM: Peggy Noonan has disappeared from the Lying in Ponds Top Ten. She still has the fifth-highest partisanship score, but with only 19 columns this year, she has fallen below the minimum of two columns per month. Ms. Noonan has written just one column since June, but a note on her OpinionJournal page says: "Her weekly column returns soon." Mary McGrory wrote 22 columns before falling ill in the spring, so she also would not have enough columns by the end of the year. As a result of Ms. Noonan's departure, Cal Thomas rises into the Top Ten. Just below him in the rankings are E.J. Dionne, Maureen Dowd and Brendan Miniter.

[permanent link]