Jim Miller has a couple of good postings today

   

"Nobody Cares About The Deficit"  So says Nobel prize-winning economistPaul Krugman, in a post in which he also tells us that nobody cares about earmarks, process, civility, bipartisanship, and parliamentary maneuvers.

Paul Krugman is a smart fellow — though you can't always tell that from his columns and his blog posts — so he must know that you can disprove any of those claims by finding one person who cares about the deficit, or earmarks, or whatever.

And it isn't hard to find that person; in my case, I was able to find one by asking the fellow who is now typing these words whether he cared about those things.  He does, which means that Krugman is wrong.

But he also wants to be fair, and so he suggested that we not take Krugman's argument literally.  (Even though he is quite unhappy about Krugman's extreme language, he thinks that we should be fairer to Krugman than Krugman usually is to his political opponents.)

If you read the whole post, Krugman seems to be saying that worries about deficits and all the rest made no significant difference in the election results.

We have two ways to evaluate that claim, opinion polls and elections results.

I had been thinking about collecting some of the polls on the deficit; luckily for me, Mark Blumenthal did so before I got around to it.  You may want to read his whole piece, but here, I think, is a fair summary

First, the percentage of likely voters that rank "the deficit" as the most important issue (19%) is only slightly bigger than among all registered voters (17%; and keep in mind that the final Pew Research likely voter results provided a near perfect estimate of the national House vote).  Second, when they tabulate both the first and second choices, the number that choose "deficit" grows (to 37%, not far from the 40% offered on the exit poll question), but then so does concern about other issues. The "job situation" (62%) and "health care" (53%) still rank higher.

The deficit was not the most important issue for most voters, but it was important enough so that any good election analyst would conclude that it provided the winning margins in some races.

We can also look at past elections to see whether deficits matter to voters, and, as it happens, we had what amounted to an experiment on the question in the 1992 election.  Remember Ross Perot?   In 1992, he received nearly 19 percent of the popular vote by campaigning, mostly, against the deficit.  (People had other reasons to support him, but there is no doubt that the deficit was his most important issue.)

So both polls and election results tell us that deficits do matter to many voters.  Someone should tell that to Paul Krugman.

- 12:29 PM, 12 November 2010   [link]

It's Not What He Said About Obama:  It's who said this, that makes it interesting.

No one, however, is more haughty than Obama in his made-up history, in his Saidist attitudes to facts, in his disdain for true and tested allies, in his ignorance of economics, in his indifference to the West (and to Christianity, for that matter) as an ideal and a reality, and finally, in his allergy to the thought that lui-même might be limited in wisdom, experience, instinct, even—as we have seen—in the power to persuade.  Yes, we can?  No, we can't.

Those sentiments could come from almost any conservative talk show host (though none of them would say it in quite the same way).

But they actually come, in fact, from Martin Peretz, the editor of the the liberal New Republic.  Who must be more than a little disappointed in Barack Obama.

(The "made-up history" phrase is especially devastating.  Peretz is implying that Obama tells lies about history, including, I suppose, Obama's own history — and that Obama does so arrogantly.)

- 8:09 AM, 12 November 2010   [link]