I know that Thomas Friedman doesn’t exist just to piss me off, because he pisses a lot of other people off too. But at the moment, I’m feeling persecuted, because I was tricked into reading his most recent column. It is all Matt Yglesias’ fault. He tweeted, “Everyone is going to hate this Tom Friedman column, but once again he’s basically right.” Yglesias is a smart guy, so I thought I’d check out the column to see if Friedman is “basically right.” No, he isn’t. In fact, he is just giving us the same line that he always does.

Thomas Friedman, like most Serious Centrists, is above ideology. He just wants to fix problems. Sure, he can see that the Republicans have gone on tilt. But that doesn’t mean the Democrats don’t have their own problems. This always reminds me of someone in 1969 watching the Cuyahoga River on fire and saying, “This is bad, but the nitrogen levels are elevated in the American River; let’s not forget that!” Balance!

Today, Friedman tells us that if Obama wins re-election, this will cause the Republican Party to reevaluate and move to the center. Okay. That’s fine. Friedman is a naive man with no understanding of psychology or sociology, but that doesn’t make him evil. If the Republicans lose the presidencies, they will (1) blame it on Mitt Romney being a moderate; and (2) become even more extreme.

In the longer term, there may be something to what Friedman says. If the Republicans do not do very well in the 2014 midterms, then the party will likely start to moderate to some degree. But even then, it is not going to be a sudden lurch to the middle. It will be a slow process that will work from the more liberal areas out. Eventually, we may see a more reasonable center right party. But to think that this will happen in the next couple of years is ridiculous.

But it isn’t when talking about the Republican Party that Friedman is most off the mark. He can’t talk about this stuff without blasting the Democratic Party over supposed entitlement reform. For Friedman, this means screwing the poor and middle classes. He seems never to have heard of the idea of eliminating the Social Security cap. Mustn’t harm the rich! Instead it is: cut and delay benefits. Friedman is like a personal trainer who only thinks you are exercising if you are in great pain.

What is most annoying about Friedman and what is very much on display today is his hubris. Somehow, because he talks to taxi drivers, he thinks he has his fingers on the pulse of America. And this causes him to make ridiculous, untrue proclamations about what the common man wants:

I like the idea that Obama has never tested his base. The truth is that the liberal base of the Democratic Party has been constantly tested. Labor unions, for example, has continued to be loyal partisans even while the Obama administration has done nothing for them. Liberals got Republican healthcare “reform” that they hate. On immigration, drug policy, and taxes, liberals have gotten nothing or worse. A man delusional enough to think that “moderate” means pro-gay marriage economic extremism is certainly delusional enough to think that liberals have gotten everything (Or anything!) they wanted. But few others would.

The real belly laughing aspect of that quote is that America wants and needs a Grand Bargain. Americans don’t care about the debt. Unless they are specifically asked about it, they rarely mention it as a concern. As for what we need: it is more deficit spending. We need to stimulate the economy. What we don’t need is more rich idiot blowhards like Thomas Friedman explaining to us what we really want.

Update (4 November 2012 8:43)

After writing this article yesterday, I wrote to Dean Baker who has been very gracious about responding to my questions:

He doesn’t pull any punches in his responses:

This morning, Dean Baker wrote about the Friedman column:

I think everyone would agree with this young woman that the first time should be with someone special:

I am no expert on wine. I just enjoy it. Unlike most things in my life, I have never tried to learn about wine and what makes it good. But I’ve drunk enough of the stuff to form some opinions. And my newest opinion is that Hahn Winery‘s 2011 Pinot Noir is a really good wine and a great price.

What I know about wine is that there are a lot of different flavors in it—in a good one anyway. Often times (and this seems to be the case with wines that are supposed to be rather good), these tastes are very distinct. In my introverted, not all that in touch with my body way, I think of the flavors as occurring in different parts of my head. I don’t really like this. I find it upsetting.

A wine can also have all of those flavors mix together. This doesn’t mean that they make a kind of mush—like a bunch of colors mixed together to make brown. The flavors are instead linked together: they overlap like tropical fish in a small tank. This is find exhilarating. And this describes the Hahn 2011 Pinot Noir.

I wish I could tell you that it has a hint of this and an underlying that. But I can’t. When I cook, I often have to smell each of the spices before I can figure out what I need. It is “fruity” but then that’s kind of what defines a pinto noir, and is the main reason I like the grape. But there are at least 5 other distinct flavors—all linked together, swimming around in my head. So there you go.

I got this bottle on sale for $10. This is the price I normally pay from very drinkable Castle Rock Pinto Noirs of the last few years. But Hahn’s 2011 Pinto Noir is far better. I must see if I can get more.

“When President Obama took office in January 2009 the US was plunging downward into the worst recession since World War II. By summer 2009, the US had begun a weak but real recovery, which at last seems to be accelerating into an expansion that more and more Americans can feel.

“President Obama gave the order that killed Osama bin Laden. He ended the war in Iraq on acceptable terms. He is enforcing tightening sanctions against Iran, inspiring hopes of a peaceful end to that country’s nuclear program.

“Meanwhile, his opponents in Congress have behaved about as badly and irresponsibly as any opposition group…”

That’s how the liberal’s favorite conservative David Frum starts his endorse of… Mitt Romney! So why, after all of the good Obama has done and all the bad the Republicans have done is Frum voting for Mitt Romney? If we don’t, his party members in Congress will destroy the United States:

Jonathan Chait notes that David Frum joked about this less than a year ago:

Frum isn’t alone in this. Pretty much every Romney endorsement from a “reasonable” source was the same. This is exactly what Paul Krugman wrote about on Friday. It is a very dangerous idea that we should elect a Republican President because that is the only way to make the Republicans in Congress behave. And this kind of logic is all the worse when it comes to supposedly reasonable conservatives like David Frum.

Update (3 November 2012 1:03 pm)

Jonathan Chait also talks about how the same thing was said when Bush Jr was running. It turned out to be sort of truth: Republicans did stop blocking legislation. But what was that legislation?

Nate Silver is not the kind of man to make brash statements. He doesn’t even defend himself when people dismiss his work because he is “thin” and “effeminate.” But there is one thing that seems to bug him: people saying that the presidential race is a toss-up.

Don’t misunderstand. He isn’t saying that Obama is necessarily going to win. In today’s column, he spends a great deal of time talking about polling errors. In particular, he talks about the likelihood that there is some kind of systematic bias in the polls against Mitt Romney. This seems unlikely. But it is possible.

(What I worry about is not that the polls are wrong, but that the Republican efforts to deny Democratic leaning voters the right to vote will be successful. For example, I would tend to think that Obama will win Florida except for this fear. Similarly, I wouldn’t even give Ohio a second thought. But it is hard to say just how successful the Republicans have been. In a sense, one just has to have faith in the Democratic ground game. In a bit more than 3 days, we will know.)

Silver argues that the poll deniers make more sense than the ignorant claims in the mainstream media that the race is a toss-up:

Ouch! For the mainstream reporters who want to push the squeaker horse race narrative, that’s got to sting.

Senator Sam Ervin was an interesting guy. There are things to like. He was against prayer in school. He opposed “no knock” searches. And he was instrumental in taking down Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. He is now something of a liberal hero because he was a big defender of Jim Crow during the 50s and earlier 60s who did a turn around and supported civil rights—at least in an anemic way.

But there are big things to dislike about him. He was against the Equal Right Amendment. He was against the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, mostly for racist reasons. And he was basically a racist his whole life. (In his defense, given his life and times, he was pretty enlightened.)

Regardless of all this, he was an interesting guy—a character as we might have said back in the day. After retiring, he recorded an album, Senator Sam at Home. It is delightful. Here is a sample (thanks to Lawyers Guns & Money):

I’d like to think that Senator Sam would have been a bridge over troubled waters regardless of race or sex.

Maybe the reason I like economics and statistics (polling, modeling—my almost hysterical love of Monte Carlo simulations) is that I am, at base, an extremely naive person. This was well on display this morning when Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei at Politico reported that Chris Christie really did want to be Mitt Romney’s running mate. The title of the article didn’t surprise me: Christie was Mitt’s first choice for VP. I figured that Christie was desirable for the ticket. But I believed Chris Christie when he said that he did not want to be the VP candidate.

But it is probably mostly the case that I just wasn’t paying attention. It seemed that Christie said a number of times that he didn’t want the spot, but most of the press coverage at the time shows him saying things like, “It isn’t my job to choose.” Still, there was a lot of reporting that indicated that Christie did turn down an offer from the Romney campaign. Now that appears to be all wrong.

It does make you wonder how things would have played out if Christie had been picked as Romney’s running mate. In the most obvious way, it would have made Romney’s campaign look less impotent during this hurricane crisis. But even more than that, I think a Christie pick would have been important for what it did not do: tie Romney to the Ryan budget. I know that the Obama campaign would have made the same arguments against Romney. But it wouldn’t have been nearly so easy.

Despite my naivete, I think this news about Christie shows one thing: he does have his sights on the presidency. Otherwise, there would have been little reason for him to want the VP slot. He could be a very successful candidate. And that’s a bad thing, because he’s a vile man with repugnant economic policies.

American Bridge has created the following anti-Romney ad, “Romnopoly.” As a political ad, it is as honest as any, and by the standards of the Romney campaign, it is a shining beacon of light. There are two things I really like about the ad. First, it has the Monopoly dog riding on top of the car (but they had to change the race car into a station wagon for obvious reasons). Dogs against Romney! The second thing I really like is that it talks about how Romney treats politics like it is a game. As I’ve written before, I think his problem is even more fundamental than that. Here’s the ad: