David Pleasant

Paul Krugman has a devastating column today on how damaged President Obama’s brand has become and how little progressives trust the president. The entire piece should be read, but here’s a sample.

[T]here’s a growing sense among progressives that they have, as my colleague Frank Rich suggests, been punked. And that’s why the mixed signals on the public option created such an uproar.

Now, politics is the art of the possible. Mr. Obama was never going to get everything his supporters wanted.

But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will “pull the plug on grandma,” and two days later the White House declares that it’s still committed to working with him.

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.

So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.

I have been harping on this for quite some time. It all began when President Obama reneged on every promise he made on FISA and it has progressed unabated ever since. If the White House wants to understand why the President is dropping so badly in the polls, they need look no further than Krugman’s piece today.

Late Update: Eugene Robinson weighs in along the same lines but focuses on the Democrats in general.

Here’s the least surprising news of the week: Americans are souring on the Democratic Party. The wonder is that it’s taken so long for public opinion to curdle. There’s nothing agreeable about watching a determined attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The Washington denizens don’t have a clue what is going on beyond K Street.

Krugman says the $1 trillion cost for health care is a bargain:

A good starting point from Paul Krugman on rebutting the Republican talking point that it is dangerous to raise taxes  in order to implement health care reform.

Kevin Drum does a righteous smackdown of Bryan Caplan for arguing that we should oppose the House health reform bill because it would raise taxes in the midst of a recession. As Kevin points out, the provisions wouldn’t take effect for several years; it takes real chutzpah, given that obvious point, for Caplan to accuse me of being disingenuous.

Actually, it’s even worse: Caplan frames the argument in terms of the nasty effects of raising labor costs. Um, we have a problem with demand, not supply; time to reread Keynes on wages.

Kevin also mentions similar arguments being made against climate-change policy. Indeed: it’s really sad to see Martin Feldstein arguing that Waxman-Markey amounts to a tax increase in the face of a recession, using numbers that, aside from being misleading, refer to the projected impact of the bill in — wait for it — 2020.