The Restive Base

I saw Paul Krugman speak last night to a packed house at Temple Sinai at a book event organized by DC's famous Politics & Prose bookstore for his The Conscience of a Liberal. The audience was clearly interested in what Krugman had to say about his book, which focuses almost entirely on the political economy of wealth and income inequality, but by far the biggest moment of the night was when he mentioned offhand in response to a question that he's "very disappointed" in the Democratic congressional majority's inability to end the war.

That prompted enormous applause from the crowd. So enormous, in fact, that I think he felt the need to start walking it back, taking account of the objective difficulty of the math in the House and (especially) Senate and putting the real onus where it belongs -- on the Republicans. And those are, of course, fair points. But still it is hard to shake the sense that a lot of Democratic members and strategists and assorted other hacks basically just don't think there's any wastage of lives and money in Iraq that it's worth taking political risks to prevent.