Comparative advantage: how economist Paul Krugman became the most important political columnist in America.

• Author: Confessore, Nicholas

There have always been columnists who, for better or worse, commanded the greatest attention of their day. Think of Walter Lippmann during the postwar consensus, Joseph Kraft during the Vietnam era, or George Will during the Reagan years. William Satire heralded the Clinton backlash of the early 1990s, Maureen Dowd the frothy, decadent latter half of the decade. In much the same way, Paul Krugman, who has written a column twice-weekly for The New York Times since January 2000, is essential reading for the Age of Bush. If you work in Washington, you probably read Krugman's column, and if you read Krugman's column, you probably have strong feelings about Krugman himself. Mention his name at a Washington dinner party, and at least a few people are bound to rave--or curse.

It's not immediately clear why. Krugman is a pretty good writer, but not a great one. He's adept at explicating numbers and statistics in clear English, but he's not a stylist like Dowd or the The Washington Post's Michael Kelly. Krugman isn't well-connected in Washington; in fact, he almost never leaves the environs of Princeton University, where he has taught economics since 2000. He's not a connoisseur of politics. He can't tell you how many votes John F. Kennedy won Illinois by in 1960 or who Arthur Finkelstein is. Nor is Krugman much of a reporter. There are few facts in his columns that any Times intern couldn't glean from documents published daily by the Congressional Budget Office or dozens of Beltway think tanks. Krugman doesn't travel around the country interviewing lieutenant governors or lard his columns with juicy blind quotes. He doesn't plot Democratic strategy like E.J. Dionne, dine with foreign dignitaries like Thomas Friedman, or write smart big-think like Ronald Brownstein. Nevertheless, for nearly two years, Krugman has been the columnist every Democrat in the country feels they need to read--and every Bush Republican loves to hate.

Krugman's primacy is based largely on his dominance of a particular intellectual niche. As major columnists go, he is almost alone in analyzing the most important story in politics in recent years--the seamless melding of corporate, class, and political party interests at which the Bush administration excels. Like most people, the Washington press, and especially pundits, were slow to grasp the magnitude of the shift. Krugman, whether puncturing the fuzzy math of Bush's tax cut or eviscerating the deceptive accounting behind Bush's Social Security plans or highlighting the corruption behind Dick Cheney's energy task force, has nearly always been the first mainstream writer to describe--and condemn--Bushonomics in plain English.

As an economist, of course, Krugman surely has an edge over most liberal pundits; his sterling academic reputation gives his critiques a punch that few Democratic politicians or liberal editorialists could hope for. But in truth, little that Krugman writes about has relied on his academic expertise. His columns aren't about trade theory or stochastic calculus, but about flagrant deceptions and fourth-grade arithmetic. What makes Krugman interesting, in short, is not just why he writes what he writes. It's why nobody else does.

Facts vs. Spin

"This is not what I do. This is not who I am," Krugman sighs. It's a week before the election, and he has invited me to his tiny, cluttered office on the fourth floor of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, an imposing pile of white marble that, from a distance, resembles an oversized bicycle rack. In pictures, Krugman looks self-assured, even a little hard-eyed. In person, he's friendly but ill at ease, a schlumpy professor in chinos and a beige button-down, who dislikes being interviewed, he says, owing to a few bad experiences with reporters. And it shows--his eyes dart nervously around the room, and every so often he rubs his face vigorously with both palms. "This is not my natural habitat. Sometimes, I think that if I had known what it would be like, I would never have agreed to do this column. What I really do is international trade and finance," he says, gesturing toward an anonymous stack of papers on one side of the room. "Professionally," he adds, "I should be worrying a lot about Brazil right now?"

In truth, Krugman hasn't been a pure academic since at least the mid-1990s, when he first began writing widely for popular magazines like Fortune and Slate. But his column for the Times has been unusual on several counts. One is what Krugman enthusiasts might call his sense of mission. Beginning during the 2000 campaign Krugman began to write frequently about George W. Bush, and since Bush took office, the president or his administration have made an appearance in about three-quarters of Krugman's 200 or so columns. He has written especially forcefully, and especially often, about the Bush administration's plans for privatizing Social Security ("Enron-like") and Bush's now-passed tax plan ("patently, shamelessly dishonest"). Indeed, Krugman has written so many columns attacking Bush's tax cut that you could make a book from them--as, in fact, he did, publishing Fuzzy Math: The Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan in May 2001. And although Krugman can get pretty worked up--he once compared Bush to the nativist French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen--he's generally not a screamer. Rather, he writes mostly about facts, and spin: the fact that at least 40 percent of Bush's tax cut will eventually go to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, versus the administration's spin that it was aimed mainly at the middle class. Plenty of other columnists have made these points. But only Krugman makes them in such detail, over and over again.

If Krugman's zeal is in part what makes him so appealing to liberal activists, it's also what makes him so off-putting to Republicans and conservatives--and a fair number of center-left journalists. Krugman is regularly attacked by fellow pundits, most exhaustively by former New Republic editor-turned-blogger Andrew Sullivan and former Washington Monthly editor-turned-blogger Mickey Kaus, each of whom inveighs against Krugman almost as often as Krugman inveighs against Bush. And like many partisans, Krugman can stir unruly passions. Last year, after he published an encomium to the late economist James Tobin, he received a bizarre screed from actor and game-show host Ben Stein; Stein, who majored in economics...