Why Kroog Attacking Obama From The Left Is Important

Doug from Balloon Juice nails it:

What’s most important about Krugman right now isn’t whether he’s right or wrong but that he’s starting to get traction attacking Obama from the left. Obama’s stimulus package was, in my view, not as large as it should have been in large part because the debate was all about whether or not it was too big. The Geithner bank plan is drawing little scrutiny from the cable chatterers because Wall Street seems to like it and the Republicans are yet to produce their own alternative 19 page flow chart on the subject. In effect, for now, the economic debate in the mainstream media ranges from Geithner-Summers banksterism to Bachmann-Santelli-Shelby currency craziness/tax holiday idiocy/”let them fail” know nothingism. That is not a healthy situation.

I would go even further, right now the public discourse is limited to a Hobson's choice between Geithner's woefully incomplete bad bailout plan and fever-bright GOP insanity on the intellectual level of "glossolalia as financial policy". Needless to say, we need a third f'ckin choice, and that's where the Kroog comes in.

Is Krugman right? Is the Obama administration too beholden to Wall Street and to the status quo, trying to save a system that is beyond salvation? Does Obama have—despite the brayings of the right—too much faith in the markets at a time when prudence suggests that they cannot rescue themselves? We do not know yet, and will not for a while to come. But as Evan—hardly a rabble-rousing lefty—writes, a lot of people have a ‘creeping feeling’ that the Cassandra from Princeton may just be right. After all, the original Cassandra was.”

If Krugman's ideas start getting play, not only can the case be made for Plan N more succinctly, but as a useful comparison it only emphasizes how utterly useless (if not borderline absurdist) the Republican party really is right now. The ideas that Obama should be drawing from are coming from guys like Krugman on the Left, not the gaping maw of failure that is the Right in 2009.

Krugman gives the Left the credit and heft it has so sorely needed at a time when serious ideas are badly required, and serves to further expose the barking lunacy of the intellectually bankrupt Right.

[UPDATE] Dday is right on the money: "Krugman is fulfilling that role, opening what many have called the Overton window, moving the conversation away from the failed conservative ideas of the past."

[UPDATE 2] Oliver Willis adds:

It’s also worth noting what it takes for an outspoken liberal to get on the cover of a newsweekly. You have to be on a different side of an issue than a Democratic president.

So say we all.