The shorthand SOTU: "What a mess"

Krugman cowers in curious case of Klein confrontationism:

I like epic confrontation as much as the next guy, and probably more so.... But we need a strategy to deal with the crazies if they really do prove irredeemably crazy, which seems all too possible.

In short, Krugman would take the coin, or the scrip, or whatever--anything to avert the incalculable pain of a global meltdown.  

Klein's prosecutorial argument: We have got to have this partisan showdown sometime or another. Krugman's defense: True enough, but we should have had it at the cliff's edge, when the damage was both containable and comparatively modest.

I find this inversion--or at least what I think is an inversion--interesting. Ordinarily one would expect the more radical Krugman to be the one advocating extreme political aggression, and for Beltway-wonderwonk Klein to be counseling peace at virtually any cost, given the dire alternative. Yet here it's the radical urging any port in the coming storm, while the wonk is damning the torpedoes and plowing full steam ahead (sorry, but revolutionary times call for heavily clichéd arms).

What's more, we've got mild-mannered Obama (so far) siding with the torpedo-damning crowd, and Krugman suspecting that Obama will blink, which, I happen to agree, he will--for the same global-economic reasons that have Krugman petrified.

Yet Klein is now correct for the very reason that Krugman was correct before: We have got to have this partisan showdown sometime or another, and since we missed our less damaging chance, this is what's left.

What a mess.

Comments

[Peter G]

This is an interesting take I have to admit. But I will play the devil's advocate and argue the case for making the debt ceiling the ground for a battle royale. In neither case can it be assumed that the showdown will produce a better future. In the case of the debt ceiling there is actually a plan B that instantly solves the financial problem. There was no such option for the fiscal cliff. In fact, absent an acceptable solution the standard temporal can displacement formula was used but not before the Democrats extracted more than a few needed concessions from the treed Republicans. You have posited that using the plan B platinum coin option will ensure a unproductive second Obama term while impeachment proceedings dominate that second term? You are perhaps right about that. It might just help reunite a fractured Republican house. On the other hand regardless of how these battles go the Republican house isn't going anywhere. And it isn't going to become more rational or less hostile. It is going to be what it is. One could argue that the proper strategy is endless confrontation. Confrontation that will provoke ever more extreme responses from the Republicans right up to 2014.

[Turgidson]

I don't think Krugman is cowering - he's been doing all he can to sound the alarm on the nonsense spewing from every GOP orifice for years and would love to see it honestly litigated.

I think he's just genuinely terrified of the prospect of what default would do to tens of millions of people's livelihoods and thinks it's far too high a price to pay for a final unmasking of GOP insanity. And I agree with him. I'd mint the coin if it came to that, but be coy about it for as long as possible.

[shsavage]

Timing is everything here. If PBO plays the coin trick before the GOP forces the U.S. into default it will look like (though it probably isn't) an unconstitutional power grab that will energize the GOP and possibly prompt the impeachment they've been dying for since 2008. On the other hand, if the default happens first, and everything goes to hell, then playing the coin trick will be seen as the President riding to the rescue. The GOP will have been entirely discredited, and PBO will look like the reasonable savior of the world's economy.