My mancrush on Paul Krugman is well known here, so it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that I thought his column today, Bigger Than Bush, was spot on. You should read it anyway. 😉

But most of the whining [from conservatives] takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck — either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House.

I wonder if we’ve heard excuses like that here at Delaware Liberal? And, the other excuse, which is often used but just as bankrupt, is that Bush wasn’t conservative enough.

So the reign of George W. Bush, the first true Southern Republican president since Reconstruction, was the culmination of a long process. And despite the claims of some on the right that Mr. Bush betrayed conservatism, the truth is that he faithfully carried out both his party’s divisive tactics — long before Sarah Palin, Mr. Bush declared that he visited his ranch to “stay in touch with real Americans” — and its governing philosophy.

The main gist of Krugman’s column today is that the Republicans have become the Party of Racists as Delaware Dem pointed out in Maybe the “R” really does stand for Racist, “perhaps racism in the GOP is more pervasive than we thought”.  Krugman agrees:

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

Oh, and the racial element isn’t all that abstract, even now: Chip Saltsman, currently a candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, sent committee members a CD including a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” — and according to some reports, the controversy over his action has actually helped his chances.

I’m sure we will see the closeted racism emerge in the comments to Cassandra’s post, Senator Webb Wants Prison Reform. Krugman then concludes his piece with his continuous plea for Obama to be bold in the direction he takes the country.

Mr. Obama therefore has room to be bold. If Republicans try a 1993-style strategy of attacking him for promoting big government, they’ll learn two things: not only has the financial crisis discredited their economic theories, the racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to.