Paul Krugman took the Obama thing to a new level yesterday. I realize that he’s probably gotten into some heated exchanges with Obama supporters because he posts at blogs like TPM on a fairly regular basis, and because he’s fixated on health care as the be-all and end-all of this campaign. And, for the record, I’m actually willing to consider that Krugman, not Obama, comes down on the right side of the health care mandate question – though mandates aren't exactly making a great show in Massachusetts so far.

However, if you would have told me a couple months ago that this kind of stuff would be coming from Krugman, I’d never have believed you. I think it demeans him, in a way, though of course it’s probably because I’m an Obama supporter. But he goes off on his rants about “Obama supporters” and never really gives us any meat to back up his claim that “most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody.”

There are two tidbits that stand out to me as highly ironic. The first is Krugman’s claim that “progressives should realize that Nixonland is not the country we want to be. Racism, misogyny and character assassination are all ways of distracting voters from the issues, and people who care about the issues have a shared interest in making the politics of hatred unacceptable.” If he were following the campaign with any regularity, he’d probably have realized that the Nixonian nature of the Clinton campaign is a major reason behind the Obama supporters’ antagonism. The Clintons work within that framework, Obama is offering a vision that repudiates it. Krugman not-so-deftly glides over the racial aspects of the Clintons’ strategy with a mention of the LBJ/MLK dustup – leaving a slew of other racially-tinged incidents unmentioned. And let’s be honest – if Obama wanted to do the character assassination thing, he could. He could go full bore against all of the controversies, contrived or not, of the Clinton presidency, and he could CERTAINLY go after Hillary on the Hillarycare debacle that set both the cause and the Democratic Party back an entire decade (where were you on that, Paul? That’s the one where all the special interests were left out of the consultations, just like you’re hoping will happen again this time). In my opinion, he should do the latter, but he hasn’t. Obama himself – and let’s remember, that’s who we’re ultimately talking about here – has chosen the high road.

The second and most ironic element to Krugman’s lament over the “Clinton rules” begins with his admission that these rules go beyond the Clintons: “Al Gore was subjected to Clinton rules during the 2000 campaign: anything he said, and some things he didn’t say (no, he never claimed to have invented the Internet), was held up as proof of his alleged character flaws.” Amen, Paulie! Our media is awful – they leech onto narratives and memes that often have no basis in reality!

So how can you POSSIBLY bitch about it in the same column that you actually claim that – as we’re starting to see elsewhere – “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality”? That’s amazing to me, utterly astounding, that you don’t see the hypocrisy in your own column. And it disappoints me quite a bit.

Obama hasn’t created the Clinton rules, and his supporters “taking comfort” in them – again, not much evidence presented – has little if anything to do with what we’re really trying to do here. I expect this kind of crap from Maureen Dowd or David Brooks, not Paul Krugman. But crap is what we’re getting.