What Paul Krugman gets wrong about Bernie Sanders

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http://www.salon.com/2016/01/28/what_paul_krugman_gets_wrong_about_bernie_sanders/
The NYT columnist has criticized Sanders for what he views as an overly idealistic politics. He misses the point

As everyone knows by now, Paul Krugman is not “feeling the Bern.” After the fourth Democratic debate — which most pundits believed Sen. Bernie Sanders won — the New York Times columnist went on a bit of an anti-Sanders spree, with a critical blog post on the candidate’s “unrealistic” health care plan (released the night of the debate), a column on his faulty and idealistic view of change, and a rather bizarre blog post arguing that a Sanders nomination and an independent run from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg would ensure Donald Trump a “yuuuge victory.” This deluge of criticism, from one of America’s most well regarded progressives, resulted in backlash from some Sanders supporters and progressives in general. According to Krugman, he has been receiving some pretty nasty mail:

“Right now I’m getting the kind of correspondence I usually get from Rush Limbaugh listeners, although this time it’s from the left — I’m a crook, I’m a Hillary crony, etc., etc..”

This is an unfortunate, though not entirely surprising response. Such scathing criticism for the truly progressive candidate, from a revered progressive writer, came as a shock to many. But anyone familiar with Krugman’s past work should know that he has always been reproachful of anything he views as being overly idealistic. “In an ideal world, I’d be a single-payer guy,” he wrote in 2007. “But I see the chance of getting universal care, imperfect but fixable, just a couple of years from now. And I want to grab that chance.” Seven years ago, Krugman was also very critical of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama — and especially of his supporters:

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The Sanders campaign is not about conjuring up the better angels of America’s nature. It is about creating a nationwide movement demanding real change. Clinton is running to play within the current broken system — the system she has thrived in. Sanders is running to overhaul it, which he regularly admits will not happen without a “political revolution” in the same vein as past protest movements. Former Secretary of Labor (under the Clinton administration), Robert Reich, summed it up succinctly on Facebook:

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1. Check out Greenwald's takedown of Krugman

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/28/paul-krugman-unironically-anoints-himself-arbiter-of-seriousness-only-clinton-supporters-eligible/