Crawling Along the Edge of a Knife

Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times that "what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater."

I admit that the same feeling has occurred to me, and the more I read of Krugman's observations, the more I find myself nodding in agreement.

Particularly after today's jobs report. The economy didn't quite lose 600,000 jobs in January, but it came close. And the unemployment rate has risen to 7.6%. Job losses haven't been so severe since December 1974 — when Gerald Ford was president, "WIN" buttons were in the news, and I was 15 years old.

"Somehow," Krugman writes, "Washington has lost any sense of what's at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again."

I have frequently pointed out that I am not an economist. But Krugman is. He is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton, in addition to being a columnist for the Times. Last year, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

So, when Krugman speaks, I listen.

These days, what he says seems so obvious to me that I am truly baffled that others, especially the obstructionists in Washington, can't — or won't — see it.

Are the ranks of the Republicans in Congress filled with Rush Limbaugh wannabes?

This isn't a game. This is deadly serious business. What the Congress does today is literally going to affect the lives of millions of people. Indeed, it will affect whether millions of people believe there is any point in continuing to live at all.

Yet the lawmakers in Washington persist in treating it as politics as usual. Their insistence on blocking the economic stimulus package is proof of that.

Krugman admits the package isn't perfect. "[A] number of economists, myself included, think the plan falls short and should be substantially bigger," he says. "But the Obama plan would certainly improve our odds. And that's why the efforts of Republicans to make the plan smaller and less effective — to turn it into little more than another round of Bush-style tax cuts — are so destructive."

Barack Obama has been president for a little more than two weeks, but Krugman is unflinching in his assessment of the new president's actions. "Count me among those who think that the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh," he writes. "What matters now, however, is what he does next."

And what would that be?

Obama should "go on the offensive," he writes. "Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation's future at risk."

In Krugman's own words, the national economy "is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge."

That is the kind of thing that the American voters elected Obama to prevent. As the president, it is admirable that he has sought a bipartisan agreement to avoid a worse economic disaster. But the disaster is largely the doing of the Republicans who were at the helm of government for so many years.

And now they refuse to cooperate when Obama and the Democrats are trying to clean up the mess and prevent an even worse situation from occurring.

Obama must not abdicate the responsibility with which he has been entrusted. If the Republicans refuse to act for the common good, he must give up on the idea of bipartisanship — at least for the time being.

Maybe bipartisanship can be achieved on something else. But if the Republicans refuse to act in the nation's hour of need, Democrats must proceed alone.

This is what they were elected to do. And that is what they are expected to do.

Obama and the Democrats in Congress must show the courage the voters expect from them.