Well put. While Krugman occasionally makes interesting points, his style is abhorrent. I'd have more respect for him if he'd written about the protests the first day they were happening and hadn't tried to frame it as a partisan issue with his usual cast of good guys and bad guys.
The thing is that Krugman isn't framing the protests or the current economic crisis in traditional partisan terms. His columns and blog posts for at least 6 months now have continually heaped blame on Obama, Congressional Republicans, and European officials from a variety of countries and parties for not following Keynes advice and heeding the lessons we learned during the Great Depression.
Krugman has heaped blame on Obama? Maybe in a mild way, but in other ways he treats the Obama Administration with kid gloves. Case in point: here are a few of the top 20 businesses that contributed the most money to the Obama presidential campaign:
Goldman Sachs $1,013,091
JPMorgan Chase & Co $808,799
Citigroup Inc $736,771
UBS AG $532,674
US Government $517,908
Morgan Stanley $512,232
Krugman has noted Obama's cozy relationship to the bankers before. Just last week he had this to say in his column about the protests:
"The Obama administration squandered a lot of potential good will early on by adopting banker-friendly policies that failed to deliver economic recovery even as bankers repaid the favor by turning on the president."
Do you consider Krugman a voice of dissent though? In my opinion he chimes in once the issue is already "safe" and rarely says anything that would endanger his status as a columnist or his relationships with powerful people.
I would only go as far as to say that Krugman is a dissenter from the prevailing line of economic thought in the United States and Europe. He's useful precisely because the prevailing thought crippled our economy and has little success in repairing it.
I can't really speak to his relationship with powerful people.
