I just sent him the following email:

Mr. Krugman,

As a big fan of Hillary Clinton (anyone but Barack and his cult of mindless young people), I've been following your columns with great interest. You are a great writer and it is a rarity to read someone who is so unbiased and unblinded to the truth.

That's why it is with much sadness that I must tell you that I'm cancelling my subscription to the New York Times and I will never read your columns again. Hillary Clinton, who is a FIGHTER for the common man, has made it clear that economists are elitists who are not worthy of our time or attention. You toil in your ivory towers spinning ideas that destroy the life in small town america, where real working class white Americans live. I feel so used.

politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/.../clinton-im-listening-to-economists-on-gas-tax-holiday

Please stop trying to keep the common man poor with your high fallutin ideas and theories. Thank you.

Te woman has slowly morphed into George Bush. It's really something else.

Hilarious post, virginiacentrist. "Elite" is the equivalent of a four - letter word in our faux populist political culture. Yes, that Krugman, how dare he. He needs to be stripped of his academic post and reeducated on a farm in Kansas.

Now we're talking!

www.dailykos.com/.../509011

I have long suspected that Hillary was a closet Republican, but I really never expected to find out that she is an unholy melding of Bush and Rove.  Only two days to go until the nightmare of Hillary Clinton is over.  

I was thinking in the shower this morning that, as much as I admire Bill's abilities and a pretty good job as president, in the end the harm he did to the Democratic party, and thence to the country, with his pathological marital relations was greater than the good he accomplished.  Because of Bill and Hillary, we lost the House in 1994.  Because of Bill and Hillary, we lost the election of 2000.  Not that they were solely responsible, but it is difficult to imagine that Gore would not have won without the weight of the Lewinsky scandal.  Hence, we also owe George W Bush to Bill and Hillary.  Unfortunately, the good that Bill did in office is outweighed several times over by the enormous harm done by Bush.

When, on May 7, the whole world (except Hillary of course) knows that her campaign is over, it will be a great weight lifted from the shoulders of the Democratic party.  I hope she retires from the senate (the sooner the better) and goes on to make another couple of hundred million writing books.  Maybe without a joint political career to manage, those two can either have a real marriage or a real divorce and live happily ever after with all the dough.

It looks like the hits that Obama took in the polls from the triple hit of Bittergate, PA, and the Second Coming of Wright have bottomed out and that his numbers are rising again.  By Wed, when the meaning of NC sinks in, they should be rising smartly as Hillary fades out once and for all.

Although I have been predicting where things would stand on May 7 for quite a while, and doing the math that shows that by that time it will be near impossible for her to win the nomination, I look forward to re-doing that calculation with concrete numbers.  We'll see how fast the supers drop.

roi,

If Hillary keeps it up, it won't be hard to understand why the numbers keep rising.

Yes, let's get rid of those snooty economists, and then prosperity will return.  Next, a radical surgery on doctors, nurses, hospitals etc should get rid of the so-called "health-care crisis."  And, finally, the complete erasing of the name "Iraq" from all U.S. atlases, wall-chart maps, and Google Earth should solve the problem of that pesky war that people keep going on about.

I don't know ... I think Hillary may have just bought my vote for $25!

Hell, that'll buy me half a tank of gas once the 'tax holiday' is lifted.

I am somewhat at a loss to comprehend why so many of you haven't seen the light that Bush/Rove learned their tricks from Clinton/Clinton!  

If we get rid of religious leaders, then maybe sin will disappear!

jet,

There can be no doubt that Hillary is far and away her own worst enemy.

Its been quite a while since I lost pretty much all regard for her, but I am starting to think that her problems may go beyond overweening ambition that cannot pause for principle of any kind.  I'm beginning to think she may actually be a bit unbalanced.  When you think about it, hat whole Tuzla episode was pretty weird, as was her insistence on declaring herself "tested, vetted, ready-day-one" as a campaign theme.  Usually people who think they are tested, vetted, and ready don't go around declaring same, least of all as a way of persuading others.  It seems as though she has a lot invested in this cultivated image of someone very important, capable, accomplished.  I don't buy it and I'm starting to think she doesn't really buy it either.  But she very much wants to maintain that façade.  Thus, when her claim to have important foreign policy experience begins to look ridiculous, she invents this Tuzla thing and is seemingly oblivious to the fact that she will certainly be caught out at that this will only make matters worse.  Here she made a policy error.  Confronted with growing evidence that it is a mistake, she morph's into George Bush, who rejects all responsible professional opinion in order to "go with his gut."  Again Hillary is seemingly oblivious to the fact she will only make matters worse.

We have had eight years of a president who will say anything, no matter how objectively ridiculous, to justify a bad policy or cover up an obvious error.  It seems as though Hillary has some of the same tendencies.  

My schadenfreude cannot help tying this discussion back to Hillary's electoral fortunes.  Although it seems like a lifetime ago since the pasting Hillary took in February, TX-OH was going to be the beginning of her great comeback.  Yet, by my count, she is further behind in total delegates today, after PA and before NC, than she was on Mar 3, the eve of the TX-OH-RI-VT primaries.  Of course, it is only by a few delegates.  None-the-less, you can never come out ahead by getting further behind.  The combination of the kitchen sink, Bitter-gate, Wright, and a series of races the demographics of which favored Hillary did succeed in stalling his momentum.  But for two months he has fought her to better than a draw and he can win merely by running out the clock.  She can't.  Conversely, the spin that Hillary has any "momentum" is just that.  It has no basis in reality.  He's taken all the heavy hits  that she and the press and Wright can deliver and he is still gaining ground, albeit slowly.  It is no wonder Hillary is going a bit nuts.  It must be infuriating and frightening to have taken all your best shots and still see your opponent relentlessly moving forward.

Funny but the only other leaders I know of who would refer (and have done so) to economists as elitists are Robert Mugabe and Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

This is slowly turning into the theatre of the Absurd.  Carville on Hillary:

www.huffingtonpost.com/.../carville-if-hillary-gave_n_100038.html

I am not sure this is how I want the Presidency determined ...

I'm waiting for Clinton to pledge not to have any economists in her White House (kind of like Edwards did with lobbyists).

There are really two possibilities here.  The first is that she genuinely thinks the gas tax holiday is a good idea, which seriously undercuts her image as the candidate that understands economics and knows how to fix things.  The second and far more likely possibility is that she knows this is a lousy idea, and is shamelessly pitching it anyway (though I suppose there's a more benign variant of this where she thinks it's a harmless idea that will help get her votes without seriously hurting the country).

The comment about economists is Bush-style anti-intellectualism repackaged for the Left.  Just replace "economists" with "scientists." It's one thing to disagree with economists, but if you're going to go against the consensus opinion among experts in the field, you should at least offer an argument about where they're wrong.

John McCain has already admitted all that economics mumbo-jumbo. Is Hillary following suit? Nay, she seems to be saying she knows TOO MUCH for economists. This is elitism.

AlanSP hits on something above. Who is she going to trust on global warming issues? The climate gnomes?

I used to have a grudging admiration for her feistiness, even as I despised her for the way she fought, but now I think a pathology is at work here. I heard that she stood up during the Stephanopolous interview and that she forced him to stand up too and that he had to kinda half-stand because of the wire to his mike, and that his blazer was lifted up by it. That just strikes me as bizarre. Why would she do that?

She makes me tired, and I can't believe she isn't tired too. But now she's also starting to scare me.  I've actually started worrying that when Obama wins the nomination, she and Bill will somehow go off the deep end and do something really scary.

Does anybody else share my fear?

And Icarus gets today's prize for comparing Hillary to a despot! At least once a day like clockwork I can count on this somewhere in the comments.

You Obama zealots  wonder why a certain element of Democrats are gonna vote for McCain and it's simply going to because you guys bug the crap out of the rest of America. If you seriously think this kind of dialogue is serving to make the country the place Obama says he want to make it, you would be mistaken. Oh joy, eight years of Arianna, Olbermann, and DailyKos this going to be so much fun. Self-righteousness from the left is just as unappealing as from the right.

I assume Hillary Clinton wouldn't be pounding the gax tax issue if she (and her advisers) didn't

Peter1943: Please read my post.  And if you disagree, please give a reason.  Hillary Clinton did say she does not go in with economists.  There are, to my knowledge, two leaders who would publicly say such a thing, and I have named those.  I meant to question Hillary's sanity, not her democratic credentials.  I can think of two other leaders (Mbeki and the President of Gambia) who might think like Hillary on the question of economists, but who would better sense than to say it, for fear of sending their economies into tailspin.

Just for your info, I am not an Obama anything.  Not American and will not be voting.  I used to root for Hillary, as late as NH, so did my entire family, for we were all quite proud of the fact that a strong woman was runningfor, and seriously had a chance at winning, the US Presidency.  We have all become disillusioned with her campaign.

So, please address the post, instead of picking fight with imaginary evil comparisons.  No, Mrs. Clinton is probably not a despot.  In her elite comment, though, she has demostrated herselt to be a crackpot.

Peter writes:

"You Obama zealots  wonder why a certain element of Democrats are gonna vote for McCain and it's simply going to because you guys bug the crap out of the rest of America."

Ha-ha!  Talk about elitism.

But you know we zealots believe that if Hillary won, a much larger group of Democrats and indys would go and vote for McCain.  At some point, Hillary suppoters may actually consider looking inward to figure out what went wrong for them and their candidate.

But we're just a bunch of cultists, so what do we know?

peter1943, keep in mind that many of the posters here seem to be declaring an Obama victory based on the logic and observation that his "tanking" in the polls seems to be stabilizing.  

Of course, those are the same pollsters who announced the presidencies of Gore in 2000, and Kerry in 2004, but so what?  

Maybe they are right, but I'm betting on an alternative Politically-Incorrect truism:  It ain't over until the fat lady sings, and she ain't opening her mouth until November.  

I'm just saying that the rhetoric used on the comments here, the incredibly sexist image of Clinton as a lunatic on the cover of this magazine, and the swooning, as Salon's Joan Walsh put it on CNN today, of the press coverage of Obama just adds up to a sum that a lot of Democratic voters just find offensive and, yes, downright elitist. Good example: current TNR cover vs beatific Obama cover being used as part of a subscription ploy below, You can talk all you want about how political opportunistic Hillary's stand on the gas tax holiday is, but how about some acknolwedgement that Obama voted for a gas tax holiday while in Springfield? People here talk all about Clinton's dirty politics, how about some acknowledgement that Obama's lawyers challenged the petitions of all his potential opponents when he ran for state senate and had them all knocked off the battle. You mock Hillary's honesty and political expediency, but it's a right wing conspiracy when Obama says Wright is not his spiritual mentor when he was the first person he thanked, before his family, on election night 2004 and the things he purportedly never heard in his sermons was what drove Oprah away in 2002.

I'm just asking for some intellectual honesty and an end to the demonization. It's just not something that is going to help your candidate's cause as this goes forward.

Very true, but I strongly suspect it won't be to serenade McCain into the presidency.  To that extent, we can all practice waiting.

icarusr, you must have meant to say that Hilary Clinton is probably not a despot, *as far as you know*.

peter1943: One might question the use of the photograph as being in bad taste, but sexist?  Please, it's not as if male politicians have not had silly pictures of them splashed on the pages of magazines.  Not evey attack on Hillary is sexist, just as not every criticism of Obama, as you have set out, is racist.  In fact, I note that it was Bill who was called "shrill" because of his comments around the time of SC ... or is that somehow reverse sexism?

Swooning over Obama?  I don't even live in the US, but "swooning" is not the phrase I would use, at least in the last three or weeks, when Wright has been the issue.  In any event, since when is "swooning" elitist?

And, for heaven's sake, what's up with this elitism business in any event.  Mrs. Clinton and her husband have on the public payroll for 35 years, as she says, and they are amongs the very rich in the country; compare that to Mr. Obama's 1.5 million.  Bill went to Oxford; both went to Ivy League schools.  In the name of honesty, could we please cut the crap on the elitism business?

Finally, the day a man is to be denied the Presidency of the United States because of whom he thanked after his election - and we are not talking about an Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden here, but the head of a legitimate and large church in the fourth largest city in the United States - is the day you might as well shut down the US and put up for auction, with a sign saying "owner has lost his mind".  I mean, just read that sentence and tell me if this is how you want your President to be elected.

This is not rhetoric, by the way, but consternation, that those of us in the rest of the Free World have to put up with this shit to know who is going to lead the greatest democracy on the planet.  For God's sake, grow up.

Talk about predictable, a Clinton supporter comes over to whine about sexism and call Obama voters "cultists" or fanatics. He mathamatically challenged fans and their sense of entitlement is tearing the party apart.

ralphnelle, there has been no "morphing." Hillary's similarities to George W. Bush, in terms of style, background, qualifications, attitude, and, in too many respects, policy inclinations, have been obvious since 2006 to anyone willing to pay attention.

To date, this blog has observed the political innovation of the All-Purpose Excuse -- the signature line that can be used to justify anything. Two examples: 1) "If we don't do it, the terrorists will win." 2) "If we don't do it, the Republicans will do

"Zealots" tend to repeat the same thing over and over, mindlessly, without emotion or the appropriate context.

You seem to fit the bill.

You're also typical. Throughout the last few generations of politics/competition/sport, it is typical for a certain percentage of members of the losing side of a competition to assume that the members of the winning side are deluded, naive, cheating, not playing fair, etc.. You're a typical manifestation of this typical behavior. You're a statistic in a political scientist's textbook. Your existence is as predictable as a coin landing 50% of the time on heads.

I'm not surprised by your behavior. A certain percentage of Hillary supporters are destined act up and flail around irrationally, searching for a psychological scapegoat or rationalization for the loss of their candidate. It's human nature. We could not survive if we could not internalize losses using scapegoats or overwrought justifications.

The only thing that troubles me is that you expect anyone to take you seriously as you predictably go through the motions. You are a statistically probable outcome of a game between two competitors, nothing more, nothing less. The irony is that knowing this will not help you get over Hillary's loss. It's probably useful for you to keep believing what you believe about Obama supporters until the pain fades and you move on to other pursuits. So I say, "Keep it up!" Do what you need to do.

Overall I think this is a good thing, in spite of the damage it is doing to the Obama Campaign.  She is demonstrating clearly and beyond all doubt to everyone following the race closely (i.e. Superdelegates) EXACTLY what she is made of.

I believe the voters will be wise enough to see through her blatant and shameless pandering.

In one small defense of Peter, that cover and the tag line "the voices in her head" was bad, they simply went far beyond analysis and into plain mockery. I have no problem with mockery on the plank, stump, spine, etc. but hold that the contents of the Print magazine should be at a much higher standard.

Peter, you should at least acknowledge that Hillary running her campaign as a quasi-Republican (at least in style) will only antagonize a very necessary part of what she would need in November. If it comes down to Hillary's base (the elderly, poor whites, radical women) vs. McCain's (the elderly, poor whites, radical religious) McCain stands a better chance of winning. It is not that blacks or the Democratic "elites" ie wealthy and educated, will vote for McCain, just that they won't vote for her. the line "I am not going to put my lot in with economists" was not a stump speech, but something said to the educated Democrats who watch the Sunday morning news shows. It was totally unnecessary and counterproductive. It is like she wants to rub our noses in it.

While I agree with all the pandering comments, I would advise the BO campaign to lay off the term.  I grew up my whole life around Joe Sixpack type folks.  They don't care whether it's pandering or not.  They don't care whether it's terrible economics or not.  They don't understand macroeconomic theory nor do they want to.  Personal economics is what they care about.

What they care about is that it'll get them $25 they didn't have yesterday because they live from paycheck to paycheck and there's usually nothing left over at the end of the week.  They drive twenty miles a day to a job or jobs they hate that pays them minimum wages and offers no health insurance.  They also view it as money that's coming from the government.  The government that they view as taking away all their hard-earned money.  The government that "hassles" them with traffic tickets, rules and regulations they don't understand and silly prohibitions ostensibly designed to protect their health.  They don't want government to protect their health, they want government to leave them alone.

What many liberals don't seem to understand is that many blue-collar people actually hate taxes even more than the Repugs and conservatives.  The reason is because they pay so much greater  a share of their income in all taxes than their better-off brothers and sisters do.

Besides that, they know the politicians have pandered to the wealthy and well-connected since time began.  They actually welcome a little pandering coming their way for once.

desert, only McCain's plans gives them the $25, Hillary just shifts the tax to the front end at the producer level. Do you honestly think Exxon won't then shift that cost down the line? End result? Exact same price. McCain, on the other hand, will just borrow the money so short term the benefit is for the consumer.

Or are you saying that Joe Six packs are too stupid to grasp a tax is a tax no matter when it is applied?

I also truly don't understand this gas tax thing. She had Obama on the ropes (actually Wright put him there) and instead she drums up this tax issue which gave the media something else to talk about, and now she is trying to justify something she need never have done. Tactically this has to be one of her biggest blunders in a while (her Tuzla gaffe was not a tactical blunder, just a blunder).

desert dog,

Your depiction of Joe Sixpack is a bit elitist and condescending. The Sixpacks I know get miffed when politicians throw them pennies while pandering to the rich. They don't just hold out their hands and chant "Gimme gimme gimme" when someone offers them a "tax holiday." And they would like some long-term solutions so they don't necessarily have to live paycheck-to-paycheck.  

No, Joe Sixpack isn't stupid.  He (or she) is capable of understanding.  The problem is that it's just not real high on the priority list because he/she is fighting too many day-to-day battles.  Perhaps he or she may also be a low-information voter becasue he doesn't have the time to watch the politics and news shows or read the internet publications.

The other problem is that they associate gasoline with big oil companies and big government, neither of which they especially like.  The other part of the economy that probably would benefit from a short-term fix are those people who drive for a living; taxis, truckers, delivery companies, etc.  Some sort of tax credit or rebate for them definitely would help out.

My point was to tone down the rhetoric or risk surrendering the issue completely to John McCain