Quarrels make everybody look fallible, and newspaper columnists try to avoid them. There’s not a columnist alive who isn’t a sitting duck from time to time, but a mutual nonaggression pact among columnists protects the general illusion of omniscience. It’s good for the ego and good for business. So the rare moments when columnists have at it bear examining.
The week after he was nominated for president at the Republican convention, Ronald Reagan spoke at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi. “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them,” Reagan told the crowd. “I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”
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The candidate “knew exactly what he was doing,” Herbert insisted, and although “commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context,” he “was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.”
The argument in the Times was barely civil. Brooks slammed slurrers, distorters, and demonizers; Herbert race-baiters; Cannon mythologizers; Krugman liars and deniers. Aside from Brooks, who cited Cannon as a source, nobody mentioned anybody else by name—pundits are a haughty bunch. But it was clear who was trying to bloody whose nose.
As for Krugman, he was laying blame for the “subprime fiasco” on the “greed” of “Wall Street titans” deposed after losing “staggering sums” for their companies in speculations that would nonetheless make them personal fortunes. It was a typical display of the forensic skills that have persuaded thousands of Times readers that Krugman’s the only one in America who gets what’s going on and other thousands that he’s a nincompoop. The point is, he’s relentless; there’s nothing to gain by taking him on. v
