Krugman: It's the GOP's own fault

Paul Krugman sets aside economics this morning to explain why the Republicans have been sucking it so hard here lately: If you run the government like government doesn't matter, it will eventually smack you in the face. Also, Republicans don't like black people.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

Krugman concludes that Obama has plenty of latitude to do what he needs to to fix the economy's foundational problems.

Mr. Obama therefore has room to be bold. If Republicans try a 1993-style strategy of attacking him for promoting big government, they’ll learn two things: not only has the financial crisis discredited their economic theories, the racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to.

That is partly true. Barack Obama is going to sink or swim based on how the economy performs in the next few years, but there is a segment -- a shrinking but significant segment, mostly in the Deep South -- that is suspicious of Obama because he is a Democrat and because he is black.

Still, if Obama wins over even 10 percent of McCain voters in Georgia, he could reduce the Republican South to a block of seven tiny states -- South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky -- that will have fewer than 60 electoral votes even after the 2010 redistricting.