The mighty columnist at the mighty New York Times has penned no less than five columns and blog posts this week taking on Sanders’s proposal for a single-payer health care system and the Vermont senator’s idealistic approach to politics in general. On Sunday, he wrote that Democrats should not “re-litigate their own biggest political success in almost half a century.” The same day, he wrote that the single-payer push is “basically a distraction.” The next day, he accused Sanders of throwing out “easy slogans and punting when the going gets tough.” On Wednesday, he addressed Vermont’s aborted attempt at a single-payer system. And today, he writes that Sanders and his supporters are letting “idealism veer into destructive self-indulgence.”
(In between, for good measure, he took a crack at his customary bête noire, Times colleague David Brooks, who is basically in the midst of an existential meltdown over this whole Trump business.)
For certain liberal readers of Krugman, his strong turn against Sanders, just as the Democratic primary race is shaping up to be actually competitive, amounts to something of a betrayal. But Krugman has been pretty consistent in his disdain for this idealistic vein in politics, being one of the few liberal commentators who didn’t take a shine to Barack Obama in 2008.
Or maybe he just really likes Hillary Clinton.