Pundit Boxscore for Wednesday 8 January 2003

LET THE SIDESHOW BEGIN: Avedon Carol at the website The Sideshow raises an important point:

LIP claims that Krugman deserves the award because of "the remarkable consistency" of his criticisms of the Bush administration throughout the year. Yet we are told that, while Krugman is aiming his criticisms at the administration that is in power, Levey and Rosett were also consistent in criticizing the Democrats, even though they are not the party in power. It seems to me that partisanship would be the only explanation for the position LIP says Levey and Rosett seem to take, while Krugman might simply be reserving his examinations for those who actually control policy. As I've said before, Krugman has not historically been particularly kind to Democrats when they have been in power, and being hostile to Bush policies doesn't make you a Democratic partisan, either. But if the two writers at OpinionJournal really do seem to be working on a formula that "all Democrats are bad", it seems hard to find even the flimsiest rationalization for pretending that it's policies, not partisanship, that motivates them.

I agree to a point -- I've said several times during the year that I suspect that the partisanship scores of Democratic pundits are likely to be higher during a Republican administration because of an abundance of targets to criticize. But that doesn't explain why Paul Krugman's score is more than twice as high as those of any other Democratic columnist.

I'm more skeptical of the idea that "Krugman might simply be reserving his examinations for those who actually control policy". I've read many times that Mr. Krugman was critical of the Clinton administration and that may have been true early on, but when I evaluated his columns from 2000 (the first year of his Times column), there was definitely no evidence of that. Look at the 2000 Krugman page and you'll see that he made over 140 negative references to George W. Bush alone, only 13 to Al Gore and a grand total of 3 to Bill Clinton. That doesn't sound like a very grueling examination for "those who actually control policy", even given that it was a lame duck year.

LET IT SNOW: I'll be in Albany, New York the rest of the week on business, where most of the snow is still on the ground from last Friday's big storm. I should be able to update the site, but probably on a more erratic schedule.