Krugman is getting close to the edge

[TheKentuckian]

55. I suspect he understands that political reality doesn't trump actual reality

A hundred votes in the Senate and 435 in the House to repeal gravity will still leave our feet firmly on the ground.

I suspect he also understands that compliance and meek acceptance of one political reality that is at odds with actual reality will without great luck result in a new ass is grass political reality when events in the universe of time and space catch up prove you false.

It is one thing to accept this is all I can get through Congress but you go into a very different ballpark when that acceptance leads you to pretend that it will work when you know you will be the one left holding the bag. At that point you removed your own defense, you cannot claim you were obstructed when you are on record playing Goldilocks, not effectively. It may pass muster among the choir but the folks outside the church ain't gonna buy it, not when your own words are used in rebuttal.

I'm also forced to consider the entire argument as excuse making since the President has for months been proposing measures that cannot be passed but also are inadequate if they were.

We also know that political reality doesn't change by embracing the current paradigm but rather by assaulting it, even when in the beginning it is strictly tilting at windmills. How many Reich wing ideas have we seen over the decades go from laughable to mainstream. They don't give a damn about how a proposal polls or if they have enough votes for passage they just keep selling it like it is the default position and relentlessly pursue their goals.
The same really goes for any movement that changes a status quo. Almost always at the start and often for many years the goals are laughable in the context of political reality.

Krugman is not so brilliant an economist that he can make inadequate, poorly targeted, or especially misguided policy prescriptions capable of fixing problems simply because they can pass Congress nor can he be blamed for not being stupid enough to play along and be wrong with an obviously (and demonstrably) wrong crowd.

Obama was beyond stupid to claim that the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8.1%. I don't know if the stupidity was fueled by misunderstanding the economics or political stupidity or both but there was nothing to stake that assessment on knowing you had too little fill for the hole and also no way not to have such an assertion hung around your neck when you made no argument and even made wild claims of how the package was just right.

If political reality is wrong then you have to push to change it because actual reality is far less malleable and certainly does not bend to the whims of poll watching technocrats.