September 30, 2004, 10:10 a.m.
Lie During, Blame After
Krugman has a strategy for Kerry-the-debater.

Paul Krugman — America’s most dangerous liberal pundit — has two pieces of advice for John Kerry on tonight’s debate with President Bush. First, lie. Second, when you lose the debate, blame the media.

In a New York Times column earlier this week, Krugman suggested that Kerry should take President Bush to task for supposedly having no strategy for handling North Korea’s nuclear menace. Here’s the lie Krugman recommends that Kerry use:

Recently, when a reporter asked Mr. Bush about reports that North Korea has half a dozen bombs, he simply shrugged.

That reporter Krugman is talking about is actually two reporters, David E. Sanger and Elisabeth Bumiller, and they both work for Krugman’s own New York Times. In their August 27 interview with President Bush, they indeed wrote that Bush “opened his palms and shrugged when an interviewer noted that new intelligence reports indicate that the North may now have the fuel to produce six or eight nuclear weapons.” But they then devoted three further paragraphs to describing Bush’s statements about his Korea strategy, with a heavy emphasis on diplomacy and multilateral cooperation (the same kind of approach, actually, that liberals usually endorse).

So did Bush “simply shrug”? Yeah, right. And O. J. Simpson simply rang Nicole’s doorbell.

Incidentally, I pointed out Krugman’s distortion of his own newspaper’s reporting, and his shameless misrepresentation of Bush’s position on Korea, to Times “public editor” Daniel Okrent. As I have come to expect after long and bitter experience, Fig-Leaf Dan once again covered up for the Times op-ed page. As I reported on my blog, Okrent replied to me, “I think this is what columnists do, and I’m not going to hold Krugman to a standard any different from the one I hold the other columnists to.”

Which is to say: no standard at all. Apparently it’s okay for New York Times columnists to lie. So of course it’s okay for them to advise a candidate for the presidency to lie, as well.

Here’s another whopper, straight from Krugman’s word-processor to Kerry’s debating podium: U.S. forces in Iraq are “obviously under instructions to hold down casualties at least until November.”

That’ll go over big. Now just how should Kerry frame that? How about, “Mr. President, enough of our soldiers aren’t being killed in Iraq! Let’s get with the program!”

No go? How about this: “Mr. President, the war is obviously a failure. So now you are trying to trick the American people by winning!”

Of course, these Krugman tactics aren’t going to help Kerry survive tonight’s debate. No matter what Krugman lies Kerry echoes, he’s bound to look like a fool when he inevitably contradicts some other lie he made up all by himself in the past. With this in mind, Krugman’s got Kerry’s excuse all limbered up for when he loses — it’s the media’s fault for emphasizing style over substance. As Krugman puts it, “Mr. Bush does a pretty good Clint Eastwood imitation.”

According to Krugman, Al Gore actually won the 2000 presidential debates. Remember, though, according to Krugman Al Gore actually won the election that year, too. And just as the Supreme Court supposedly stole the election from Gore, the media stole the debates from Bush. Here’s Krugman’s revisionist history:

Interviews with focus groups just after the first 2000 debate showed Al Gore with a slight edge. Post-debate analysis should have widened that edge. … But … [a]fter the debate, the lead stories said a lot about Mr. Gore’s sighs, but nothing about Mr. Bush’s lies. … [A]fter a few days, Mr. Bush’s defeat in the debate had been spun into a victory.

So some unspecified focus groups prove to Krugman that Gore really won. These are probably the same focus groups that told the Coca-Cola Company that “New Coke” would be a marketing sensation. But that darned old conservatively biased media (you know the players — CBS, the New York Times, and so on) threw it to Bush by focusing on “Mr. Gore’s sighs.”

What Krugman cavalierly called “Mr. Bush’s lies” four years ago are in fact just policies with which Krugman disagrees — it’s no wonder they didn’t get any particular press attention. And what Krugman dismissed as mere “body language” — Bush’s straight-shooting Clint Eastwood style versus Gore’s haughty sighing and eye-rolling — were, in fact, matters of urgent substance, not mere style, to voters. They were the subtle keys to the character of the men who would lead the world’s most powerful nation.

In 2000, American voters made a perfectly rational choice about character. Before the debates, Gore led Bush in the polls by about the same amount that Bush now leads Kerry. But then voters got a good look at Al Gore — a man of weak character who had to resort in the debates to over-the-top theatrical gestures, desperately following paid advice from feminist Naomi Wolf on how to be an “alpha male.” Voters quickly decided they’d prefer the plain-spoken Texan — a man requiring nobody’s hokey advice on how to be more manly.

A new Krugman Truth Squad member — psychologist and philosopher Keith Burgess-Jackson — notes on his blog that the same thing is likely to happen tonight:

Substance means character, vision, and values. These will be on display during Thursday night’s debate. Those who tune in will see which candidate is brave, determined, strong, and capable, and which grasps the nature of the threat we face in this frightening new world.

Perhaps Krugman’s insistence that personal style must be ignored is because, as anyone who has seen him on TV knows, his own personal style is that of Woody Allen on a bad hair day. But what is even more significant is Krugman’s insistence that Kerry try to win the debate by lying. For all Krugman’s Bush-hating passion, it must be the case the he can’t think of any true statements with which Kerry can attack Bush.

Well, perhaps there’s one. Krugman says that Kerry should attack the president because he has failed to capture Osama bin Laden. But maybe before Kerry takes Krugman up on this particular piece of advice, he ought to check with the little woman as to whether it’s true or not. Teresa Heinz Kerry has been out on the campaign trail spreading the innuendo that bin Laden has already been captured, and is being saved for an “October surprise” to boost the Bush campaign. Last week she told an audience in Colorado,

Osama bin Laden is now Osama bin lost. He may now become Osama bin found in short order. Who knows?

— Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your comments at don@trendmacro.com.

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