Paul Krugman jumps on the jump-on-Obama bandwagon today, and overemphasizes and overstates the meaning of Obama’s off-hand claim that many rust belt communities have almost completely taken it on the chin since 1989.  He writes: “In fact, the Clinton years were very good for working Americans in the Midwest, where real median household income soared before crashing after 2000. (You can see the numbers at my blog, krugman.blogs.nytimes.com.)” 

A great deal, of course, depends on how you aggregate the Midwest, no?  Let’s imagine that Krugman means by the Midwest an arc that goes from Buffalo to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Peoria, Waterloo and Minneapolis/St. Paul.  While Krugman is surely correct that, during the Clinton 90s, median household income in many large places in the region increased fairly dramatically– think of gentrified Pittsburgh; the growing spaces between Dayton and Cincinnati; the explosion of Indianapolis, Columbus and Grand Rapids; and the redevelopment and expansion of Chicago and Minneapolis/St Paul, and all the new exurban/post-suburban growth in spotty once-rural areas across the region, to lay out a couple examples... such an analysis focuses on exactly the wrong areas.  Has Krugman been to Buffalo, Binghamton, Altoona, Cleveland, Toledo, Fort Wayne, Detroit, Flint, Jackson, Saginaw, Muskegon, Gary, Rockford, Milwaukee or Green Bay recently – much less the rural hinterlands between these towns?

Again, while Krugman is (and others have been) right that the key word was not “bitter” but was, rather “cling,” he is – at least potentially – wrong that Obama needs to be heard as suggesting that economic hardship drives people to religion, an individualist interpretation of the second amendment, xenophobia and anti-globalization sentiments.  People cling to what they already have, they grasp for what they don’t have.  It may be that Obama intended to suggest that industrial and service workers in the Midwest have been driven to these things by hard times, but it is – I believe – empirically true that many many of the folks most hurt by the creeping advance of the rust belt were already religious, committed to the right to bear arms, xenophobic and isolationist…   

This last argument means that all of Krugman’s special pleading about rates of church attendance being higher in the South – not the rust belt – and lower in Main and Montana – also not the rust belt – hold little or no water.  If “ within poor states, people with low incomes are actually less likely to attend church than those with high incomes” and the “correlation runs the opposite way in rich states,” this only has meaning if rust belt states fall straightforwardly in the rich and poor state piles, and they don’t.

Furthermore, Krugman is right that “none of this suggests that people turn to God out of economic frustration” but, at the same time, many of us know folks who have turned to god in times of personal crisis – something often tied to income issues – and even more than that, many folks have turned to their church as a means of holding on to a sense of stable identity and collective community when times are tough.

To give him his due, Krugman is more than likely correct about the lack of strong correlation between low income and voting primarily based on social issues, though he fails to note that there is a correlation between low income and not voting that trumps a great deal of what Obama’s comments to that effect assumed and the importance of Krugman’s counter argument. 

Lastly, Krugman ends his op ed with the implicit suggestion that he thinks Obama has the nomination locked up and that he hopes that “once Mr. Obama is no longer running against someone named Clinton, he’ll stop denigrating the very good economic record of the only Democratic administration most Americans remember.”  Here, again, however, we have a situation where off-the-cuff comments are taken far too seriously… I don’t believe for a minute that Obama has failed to note the destruction, by the Bush Administration, of the healthy American economy Bill Clinton handed George Bush in 2001.  Krugman could surely find instances of this and need not overstate the unmediated ad unambiguous meaning of Obama’s statements in San Francisco.