‘Something has gone very wrong with America’: Krugman and Wells

For President Obama’s supporters, this is a tense time as they wait for the
Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act. If the court strikes down
the act, or even the individual-mandate portion, it’ll make it that much harder
for Obama to win a second term.

I still think Obama did the right thing by pushing health care as a major
initiative, but I agree with some commentators that he has done a poor job
defending it and reminding Americans of the problems it’s designed to address.
But if the court overturns the act, it’ll give Republicans still more
ammunition to aim at Obama, and in health care and many other areas, we’ll take
a huge step backward.

The biggest ammunition, of course, is the US economy. And there, too, Obama
bears some blame. The July 12 issue of The New York Review of Books includes a
solid assessment of that problem: Paul Krugman and Robin Wells’ “Getting Away With It,” a review of three books on the
economy and the federal government’s attempt to deal with it.

It’s a fascinating look at recent history: the mistakes the Obama
administration made (most important, putting the wrong people in charge of the
fix), the public’s growing ignorance about key issues, the “capture” of the
Democratic Party by Wall Street, and the growing extremism of the Republican
Party.

And Krugman and Wells end their piece with this depressing comment:

“But ultimately the deep problem isn’t about personalities or individual
leadership, it’s about the nation as a whole. Something has gone very wrong
with America, not just its economy, but its ability to function as a democratic
nation. And it’s hard to see when or how that wrongness will get fixed.”

This article appears in Bye bye unions?.