Paul Krugman, "Off and Out With Mitt Romney": Farewell to Objectivity

"And I think he had a good business career. There is a lot of controversy about that. But if you go in and you try to save a failing company, and you and I have friends here who invest in companies, you can invest in a company, run up the debt, loot it, sell all the assets, and force all the people to lose their retirement and fire them.

Or you can go into a company, have cutbacks, try to make it more productive with the purpose of saving it. And when you try, like anything else you try, you don't always succeed.

. . . .

So I don't think that we ought to get into the position where we say this is bad work. This is good work.

. . . .

There's no question that in terms of getting up and going to the office and, you know, basically performing the essential functions of the office, the man who has been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold."

Bill Clinton speaking about Mitt Romney, May 31, 2012

In his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Off and Out With Mitt Romney" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/opinion/off-and-out-with-mitt-romney.html), Paul Krugman says of Mitt Romney:

"His case for becoming president relies, instead, on his claim that, having been a successful businessman, he knows how to create jobs.

This, in turn, means that however much the Romney campaign may wish otherwise, the nature of that business career is fair game. How did Mr. Romney make all that money? Was it in ways suggesting that what was good for Bain Capital, the private equity firm that made him rich, would also be good for America?

And the answer is no.

The truth is that even if Mr. Romney had been a classic captain of industry, a present-day Andrew Carnegie, his career wouldn’t have prepared him to manage the economy."

Strange. That's not what Bill Clinton is telling us. And who knows better about what it takes to occupy the Oval Office, Clinton or Krugman? The answer is obviously Clinton, unless you ask the question of Paul.

By the way, what were Obama's qualifications for high office? Writing fictional autobiographies?

The reality is that Obama is attacking Bain Capital, i.e. running a negative campaign, because his management of the US economy is a shambles. And whereas Romney proved himself adept at making money, Obama has demonstrated that he is talented at running up deficits to the tune of over a trillion dollars per year with little to show for it.

Am I pleased with the Romney campaign? No way. We're not being given answers. Romney claims that he is displeased with the way in which Obama has been managing the economy, but in concrete terms, what is he going to do differently? Romney says that he opposes Obamacare, but what is he going to do instead to remedy a dysfunctional health care system?

With America mired in crisis, both candidates appear content to coast their way toward November with no groundbreaking proposals to address the country's troubles.

By the way, what have the candidate been saying about Afghanistan? In fact, neither one dares to say a word.

Shameless, contemptible and degrading, as is Krugman's total lack of objectivity.