Paul Krugman

by Sam Adams

books

Paul Krugman is not funny. Krugman's The Great Unraveling (Norton) may be sharing the bestseller list with books by Al Franken and Michael Moore (not to mention the unintentionally hilarious works of Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly), but unlike them, he doesn't camouflage his attacks with humor. When he says, "The Bush administration lies a lot," he's not kidding around.

From his bully pulpit at The New York Times, the economist turned op-ed columnist specializes in red-flagging the Bushies' most egregious abuses of power, including the astonishingly blatant cave-ins to corporate interests at the EPA and the Department of the Interior. As Krugman's determination has grown, so has the vehemence of his critics, but he's still astonished at those who brand him radical (no doubt the same folks who think Dean is an extremist). "In the proper sense of the term, I'm conservative," he says from his office at Princeton. "I like the New Deal and the Great Society, which almost everyone in the U.S. has spent their entire lives living under. The only thing that's radical is to say that these people in the White House are radical."

In Unraveling's introduction, Krugman brands the current administration "a revolutionary power," taking a term from a decades-old work by, of all people, Henry Kissinger. Though Kissinger applied the term to Napoleonic France, Krugman finds his description of "a power that does not accept [the current system's] legitimacy" meshes perfectly with the Bushies' disregard for democratic processes.

Just as Kissinger's outside framework strips away preconceived notions of presidential propriety, so Krugman feels his outsider status as a "part-time journalist" frees him from "the curse of evenhandedness," giving him room to say what others either can't see or won't admit. (Krugman was initially forbidden to use the word "lie" to describe Bush's tax plans, a stricture that has obviously since been lifted.) Expressing his hope for a "great revulsion" in which Americans recoil from an administration that has consistently played them for saps, Krugman still sees a "hellish" election ahead, and a growing nastiness in the political mood. "The public's getting very extreme; I can see it in the mail I get," he says. "What's happening is actually kind of scary. It makes it a lot harder to have a reasonable political discourse about anything."

Paul Krugman reads Fri., Nov. 21, 1 p.m., free, Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., 215-686-5322.