July 26, 2008
Paul Krugman is Off Today
So endeth the editorial...
I hope the NYTimes faithful were not too disappointed in getting David Brooks instead. I bet they were, for Brooks was on a tear. He admits that when he first Senator Obama's soaring [C'mon people now] rhetoric [smile on your brother] in Iowa [Everybody get together] "I have to confess my American soul was stirred. It seemed like the overture for a new yet quintessentially American campaign."
The Berlin blockade was thwarted because people came together. Apartheid ended because people came together and walls tumbled. Winning the cold war was the same: “People of the world,” Obama declared, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together and history proved there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”
Yet, now, the paucity of substance is becoming problematic:
But now it is more than half a year on, and the post-partisanship of Iowa has given way to the post-nationalism of Berlin, and it turns out that the vague overture is the entire symphony. The golden rhetoric impresses less, the evasion of hard choices strikes one more.When John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan went to Berlin, their rhetoric soared, but their optimism was grounded in the reality of politics, conflict and hard choices. Kennedy didn’t dream of the universal brotherhood of man. He drew lines that reflected hard realities: “There are some who say, in Europe and elsewhere, we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin.” Reagan didn’t call for a kumbaya moment. He cited tough policies that sparked harsh political disagreements — the deployment of U.S. missiles in response to the Soviet SS-20s — but still worked.
If Senator Obama's view of the past does not quite mesh with reality, is it any surprise that his view of the future is similarly clouded?
The great illusion of the 1990s was that we were entering an era of global convergence in which politics and power didn’t matter. What Obama offered in Berlin flowed right out of this mind-set. This was the end of history on acid.Since then, autocracies have arisen, the competition for resources has grown fiercer, Russia has clamped down, Iran is on the march. It will take politics and power to address these challenges, the two factors that dare not speak their name in Obama’s lofty peroration.
Now that's a quote of the day: "It will take politics and power to address these challenges, the two factors that dare not speak their name in Obama’s lofty peroration."
Hang on Timesers, Krugman will be back soon. I am certain of it.
Hat-tip: Tom Maguire