The Miseducation of Brad DeLong

I’m a great admirer of Brad DeLong’s blog, but I have a tough time makinge sense of the great glob of bile and spittle that he just landed on Bill Greider (link). Geezers will remember Greider as the author (or at any rate, the amanuensis) of The Education of David Stockman (get yours for $1.96), in which Stockman details to Greider how he discovers that the Reagan fiscal/economic policy was all smoke and mirrors. Among reporters in his generation, Greider (whose politics often strike me as near-looney) is one of the shrewdest observers of humankind. He’s sympathetic, funny—and often devastating, as he was here in this which was for him (as I recall) pretty much of a career-making item.

Apparently (I learn via DeLong) the SEC now believes that Stockman “may have lied” in fronting for a rust-belt auto parts company that later collapsed into bankruptcy (link). I learn also that Greider, now at The Nation, has mounted a sort-of defense (link). It’s actually pretty anodyne stuff. Greider says of Stockman (who has not been formally accused of anything):

I don't know the facts of Stockman's present travail, but I have a hunch he is guilty mainly of excessive optimism, not fraud. When asked, I express sincere sympathy for his plight.

Recalling Stockman’s Washington days, Greider recalls:

His greatest sin … was telling the truth, albeit belatedly. That is one transgression Washington does not forgive.

This strikes me as entirely correct. So far as I can tell, Stockman went into the Reagan administration a true believer. At some point, the scales fell from his eyes. At some later point, he bared his breast to Greider, who rode it into one of the decade’s most amusing bits of political inside baseball.

For this latest apologia, DeLong adds Greider to the post-office wall display headed “Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?” He says:

But there was no truth-telling exercise to collaborate in. Republican Vice President George H.W. Bush knew that Reagan's fiscal policies didn't add up; he and his people coined the phrase "voodoo economics." Republican Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker knew that Reagan's plan made no sense: he called it a "riverboat gamble," meaning an imprudent and unwise throw of the dice.

DeLong thereupon anatomizes four different categories of Reagan partisans. He puts Stockman in group four:

Those who knew that the tax cuts and defense spending increases would unbalance the budget, and thought that the deficits created would put irresistible pressure on congress to do what it would never do otherwise--shrink a social insurance state.

There’s a grain of truth in this categorization, but it utterly fails to capture the essence of Stockman's experience, and Greider's narrative. The point is that Stockman came into the administration with a vision, however misguided, of how to Make Things Work. What spun him –and what he told Greider about—was the discovery that almost nobody in the entourage gave a rat’s patootie about whether it worked or not: they were there for short-term profit and let everything else go hang.

Oddly enough, DeLong doesn’t even identify a category for these: the self-serving liars and hypocrites who made the whole system go. Instead he speaks of

The innumerate and gullible--most of them willfully so--who did not look into assurances that the Reagan administration's plan would balance the budget.

I suppose there were some innumerate and gullible (though “willfully…gullible” skirts dangerously close to incoherence). Yet the truly innumerate and gullible were, for the most part, those in the audience—the voters or the bystanders, who deluded themselves into believing they had a role in it all (I suppose I would include the President himself, floating out there like a plaster Madonna at the front of a Corpus Christi parade). Nobody can rightly call Stockman “innumerate.” He was “gullible”—but not about “the plan.” He was gullible not to anticipate the tsunami of venality (okay, grand theft) that came to roll over him.

Greider says he disclosed “bracing realities”—DeLong says there were no “bracing realities” to disclose. But there were: not about the voodoo-ness of voodoo economics, but about the wholesale knavery that lay behind it. DeLong calls it “he said-she said” journalism. But it is not: it is “he-said” journalism, in that he is describing how one well-intentioned country boy lost his cherry.

If there was an Emmy for missing the point, then for this one, DeLong would be a contender. No wonder I can never understand macro.