Pundit Boxscore for Friday 21 November 2003

DELONG DEFENSE: Brad DeLong vigorously defends Paul Krugman in a letter to The Economist:

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.