So I'm easing in to this. I've been traveling on biz, too, so this post on his Tuesday column will be just a couple links to stuff my fellow Krugman-watchers have already put up. He'll get the full treatment from me on Friday's column (if Keller hasn't fired him by then).

Robert Musil, on the Man Without Qualities blog, leads off with an hilarious welcome back to Herr Doktorprofessor. Read the whole thing, but here's a sampler:

"The column is nothing more than a desiccated rehearsal of the inadequately supported anti-Bush, 'he lied,' 'Blair lied,' 'the intelligence services lied because Bush and Blair made them lie' memes that have been cluttering the media for the last week or so. Those charges have already been answered by various people in the Administration, the Blair administration and the media.

"Herr Doktorprofessor adds nothing new. His arguments are but Ka hovering among funerary models of real world objects. We are moved to leave him to his eternal peace.

"Herr Doktorprofessor does emit one tentative sign of life at the very beginning of the column, where he notes ambiguously:

"More than half of the U.S. Army's combat strength is now bogged down in Iraq ... We have lost all credibility with allies who might have provided meaningful support ... All this puts us in a very weak position for dealing with real threats. Did I mention that North Korea has been extracting fissionable material from its fuel rods?

"At first this might be read as arguing that Herr Doktorprofessor thinks the U.S. Army's combat strength may be needed soon to strike at North Korea. Herr Doktorprofessor seems as though he wants to say (the way frustrated spirits want to send messages to us from the afterlife) that the new Korean War he thinks that we need is just not possible because the strength of the U.S. Army has been bogged down and our former allies will just not help now that we have lost 'all credibility.'

"But, since Herr Doktorprofessor doesn't complete the thought that almost emerges from his pretty damn peculiar semi-suggestion, we are left to conclude that this was no sign of life after all. Just some burp resulting from inadequately purged decomposition gases, perhaps."

Matthew Hoy, on the HoyStory.com blog, speculated last week that Krugman was not on vacation at all, but had been "designated an unlawful combatant and shipped off to Gitmo -- I was apparently incorrect." Now that Krugman's back, Hoy is all over him as usual. There's lots more in his full post, but here's a sampler:

"Normally I wouldn't be skeptical about solid numbers (with the exception of some poll numbers), but with Krugman, experience has taught me to be wary. According to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on yesterday's 'Meet the Press,' the number of troops we currently have in Iraq is about 147,000. Now, not all of those are 'combat' troops, though everyone over there, even the supply clerk, has a firearm. According to the Defense Department, the total number of Army personnel as of April 30 (the latest figure available) is 491,309. There is a stop-loss order in effect, so that number isn't going down. That leaves 344,309 Army personnel who aren't in Iraq.

"In fact, a May 7 report by the Christian Science Monitor has the Army deploying 'more than one-third' of its combat troops in Iraq. Journalists like easy fractions -- 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, 1/3, 2/3 -- you'll seldom see them use any others. And they always pick the nearest one to the ratio they need to report.

"Is Krugman exaggerating for effect? Well, lessee 'bogged down?' Yes, I'd say that Krugman is exaggerating. In fact, if I were Krugman and Krugman was (God forbid) the president, then I think I (Krugman) would accuse him (the President) of lying."

"I should have been quicker to recognize that I was moving this new – one, putting tremendous work pressures on the staff, which responded wonderfully. I worked them too hard and didn't rest them enough. And also I moved in terms of the culture of the Times newsroom, I moved the newsroom too far, too fast."

How did Rose react to that kind of blame-the-victim cover-up? Rose's follow-up questions did not confront Raines with testimony or evidence of his reckless management style and his lapses of journalistic ethics -- such as the claim in David Margolick's article on Raines in the latest Vanity Fair that he forced reporters to add known falsehoods to their stories. And not a word about the paper's out-of-control liberal bias, its political correctness, or its disastrous affirmative action policies. Instead, the follow-ups were little more than open-ended "oh really's" and "tell-me-more's" that gave Raines the opportunity to just keep piling the self-justifications higher and higher. Here's an exchange -- if you can call it that -- in which Raines cited his absurdist flood-the-zone coverage of the Enron story as an example of something he did right (while the Times has since had to recant some of its hasty accusations).

"CHARLIE ROSE: Do you look back then and say, you know, I didn't -- I see my management style, which seems to be at the core of what happened in that explosion after Jayson Blair? You have no regrets about it and you find no fault with it and it was necessary to do what you wanted to create for the New York Times?

"HOWELL RAINES: I’m saying something more nuanced I hope. But one thing I am saying -- I have been criticized for using sports metaphors – and I’ll use one now -- I have always believed that if you are a fastball pitcher, you have got to throw heat. You’ve got to do what do you well. And --

"CHARLIE ROSE: And that means -- that metaphor means in terms of running the Times, what?

"HOWELL RAINES: That I have a certain management style which involves moving forward into the news and answering the information needs of our readers -- the most sophisticated readership in the world, I think -- over a broader range of subjects than just foreign policy, than just Washington, than just New York City Hall – but over the range of high culture, over the range of popular culture, over the range of sports, over the range of business. I'm proud of the fact that after Glenn Kramon and I devised a new strategy for the business section, which was very different than what had prevailed before, we moved from a business section that didn't get mind getting beaten by the Wall Street Journal on mergers and acquisitions, from a business section that was written for consumers rather than for our downtown professional financial community, to business section that was much more competitive and much more hard edged in the business and financial content that it produced. As a result of that, Glenn took that department -- and its his achievement -- not mine -- and dominated the Enron story, and to my knowledge that is the first business story in living memory where the Times has been in the front or in the hunt, along with the Journal and Business Week, and the other business publications..."

And here's a gem... Raines got a little too comfortable at one point, and made the error of raising an issue about which he had not been asked -- the matter of his running a "star system" in which is pet reporters for the best jobs and the best ink. Look how Rose helps Raines get out of it:

"HOWELL RAINES: I don't know how to be much clearer than that. I mean, perhaps I can think of an example in a moment. All right. I can. Let me demystify that, if I may. I have been accused of running a so-called 'star system.'

"CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly.

"HOWELL RAINES: The star system is a pejorative term for a system that seeks out the talented people on the staff, matches them up with the big stories, demands hard work and gives them rewards. That's what the 'star' system is. It replaced a system that was the buddy system. Where people were rewarded according it merit but also often got assignments or rewards based on who they knew or how well plugged in they were to the old boy network around the current executive editor or some other subeditor. How did this manifest itself in ways that hurt the paper? When I became executive editor, John Burns was sidelined as a foreign correspondent. He has won two Pulitzers. I think in the history of journalism he will go down as one of the great foreign correspondents in the post-war era.

"CHARLIE ROSE: And did a brilliant job in Baghdad.

"HOWELL RAINES: So when the – and did a brilliant job in Baghdad. And when the Iraq War -- I mean when the Afghan War came along, I didn't know why John had been sidelined. I didn't know why he was frustrated; I knew he was; he told me he was. I knew he wasn't being used correctly to his maximum. I simply said we have got the best guy around; let's send him to the war. To me that's the 'star' system, is matching up reporters –

"CHARLIE ROSE: And you brought Patrick Tyler over from Moscow and put him in Washington, --

"HOWELL RAINES: Right.

"CHARLIE ROSE: -- and people thought he was the bureau chief in waiting, but he was the guy you wanted to see on the best stories because he was the guy that you had confidence in, --

"HOWELL RAINES: Yes.

"CHARLIE ROSE: -- and you believed that the Times would get the best stories, and so that's what you did."

The only thing even resembling a tough question was this rambling, nearly incoherent challenge to Raines' assertion that it was Raines' vision -- rather than his obnoxious management style -- that did him in. And even this ended up being just another opportunity for Raines to stay on-message:

"CHARLIE ROSE: And all these things that came out of that meeting, I mean you had people -- were -- having to do with dictatorial style, autocratic – centralized power – contemptuous, dismissive, sarcastic; people felt devalued, all of that. That's not about, it seems to me, people responding to – so they are saying the wrong thing – responding to being pushed to be better than -- and setting the level of expectation too high.

"HOWELL RAINES: Yes. That's language that I submit suggests a discomfort with the cultural change that was going on inside the paper and the movement from a very comforting, undemanding culture of complacency to a performance culture. Now, I don't know every person's opinion and perception is something that can't be argued with. What I do know is that for every person who said those kind of things in that meeting I got ten or twenty letters and e-mails saying I don't agree with that at all; we're on the right track; the newspapers that we have produced over the past 20 months are the best in the history of the Times. So, you know, there are two bodies of opinion there."

Perhaps the most revealing moment was when Raines chose to take on the oft-repeated criticism that he cheapened the Times by moving sleazy pop-culture stories to the front page. Raines has been mocked repeatedly for defending a Britney Spears front-pager as a "sophisticated exegesis of a sociological phenomenon," and it's tragically revealing that -- after all that has happened -- he is, in essence, repeating that same defense now. Surely he knows he is being mocked for this kind of pompous self-justification, and surely it profoundly wounds him -- but his fragile self-conception permits him do nothing better than just keep leading with his chin...

"HOWELL RAINES: ...I want to bring up something that is often cited as -- in articles. The Britney Spears story on the front page.

"CHARLIE ROSE: That you wanted Britney Spears on the front page.

"HOWELL RAINES: What no one has reported is what the story was actually about, which is I wanted a story about the sociology of a -- that's going on in the country where we have an industry that picks a sexually precious looking young woman, lifts her out of obscurity, elevates her to a level of wealth and acclaim far in excess perhaps to her talents and then drops her like that. That says something about the sociology of the country. It says something about the business of this country -- the record business, the entertainment business -- and it speaks to -- it speaks a language the language of style and culture that the people in this country under 35 are speaking. They know a world that a sophisticated reader of the New York Times need it's be exposed to, so the Britney Spears was a sociological story..."

It's hard to know what we're dealing with here. A slick self-promoter with Clintonesque audacity and a limitless ability to bull through the most humiliating defeat by an act of sheer shamelessness and on-message willpower? Or are we looking at a broken man...? Either way, it's no surprise that Raines would want this interview to be conducted by a friend. Soon he'll run out of friends, and then there won't be any more interviews.

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:11 AM | link