A week's worth of useful links I didn't get around to commenting on previously:

• Peter Daou: How a handful of liberal bloggers are bringing down the Obama presidency: No doubt it's easier to tear something down than it is to build something new, but there's plenty reason to doubt the title, and for that matter the sniping from Obama's spokesguys.

  I've argued for some time that the story of Barack Obama's presidency is the story of how the left turned on him. And it eats him up. You know it from Robert Gibbs, you know it from Rahm Emanuel, you know it from Joe Biden and you know it from Obama himself.

  The constant refrain that liberals don't appreciate the administration's accomplishments betrays deep frustration. It was a given the right would try to destroy Obama's presidency. It was a given Republicans would be obstructionists. It was a given the media would run with sensationalist stories. It was a given there would be a natural dip from the euphoric highs of the inauguration. Obama's team was prepared to ride out the trough(s). But they were not prepared for a determined segment of the left to ignore party and focus on principle, to ignore happy talk and demand accountability.

  Given how conservative Obama is and his administration has behaved, the only way I can chalk up the "given" that the right would be out to destroy him and his administration is their overweening sense of entitlement (something we saw equally when Bill Clinton was elected): how dare a Democrat assume the helm of Commander-in-Chief? I don't doubt that Obama has been less corrupt and less malicious than Bush was or McCain would have been, but I can't think of any issue where Obama has embraced a left position -- at best he's sought a center position explicitly rejecting the left, and in many cases (Afghanistan, targeted assassination) his centrist position might as well be the right's. He would be the immature one if he didn't recognize that his constant rejection of left proposals would result in opposition, at least over those principles. If anything is getting under Obama's skin, it isn't the cold political calculus; it's that those liberal bloggers are able to use Obama's own words to show how he's changed position, which raises a question about integrity among people who were among the first to support him. At least when the right attacks Obama, they just make shit up. And they represent positions so opposed to the best interests of most people that Obama becomes politically defensible.

  Daou followed up with another post here. The issue Daou posits that I don't see is the "convergence of left-right opinion is a critical factor in the shaping of conventional wisdom against Obama." I don't see any such convergence, but then I don't see the Tea Party Movement as populism -- it's even less than the overrated Fascist fronts of the 1930s. Daou explains:

  Typically, countervailing left-right narratives create enough tension to prevent the public from rapidly congealing around a single view. However, in some cases (Bush with Katrina, Obama on health care), left and right come to agree that a political leader is on the wrong track. It is this merging of left-right opinion that has damaged Obama. He can sustain relentless attacks from the right -- it's what everyone expects -- but when the left joins in, the bottom drops out. That's why opinion-shapers in the liberal blogosphere exert inordinate influence over Obama's fortunes.

  I get the theory, but don't see applications, unless you think that left complaints that Obama is too chummy with banks and big business gives credence to the right's unserious charges of corruption. The only real left complaint about health care reform is that it should have gone much further, and that some real leadership on the issue could have sold a much bolder plan. That may or may not be true, but no one on the right is making that charge, so where's the convergence?

  Speaking of which, Steve Kornacki: Obama's 2012 insurance policy? has the scoop on GOP presidential nominees. I'll stick with Huckabee as a guess, but right now the favorite is Mitt Romney. As you no doubt recall, before going into politics Romney made his fortune in leveraged buyouts: his group would buy up a company, borrow insane amounts of money, pay themselves huge fees, then dump the company staggering dumbly under a mountain of debt. Sounds like the perfect GOP pledge for America, except for his fake credentials as a social fascist, err, conservative.

• Jacob S Hacker/Paul Pierson: Wall Street's attacks could turn Obama into a true populist: Some wishful thinking -- I don't see that Obama has a populist bone his body. On the other hand, there is a residual well of populist anger in this country that a smart politician could tap into, especially if it's clear that he's lost the business support he craves. Roosevelt did that in 1936 when he "welcomed the hate" of business fat cats, but that well was deeper then, not because objective conditions have changed much but because the ideological hold of the rich is much stronger.

  But this has it exactly backward. The business-Obama divorce isn't about personalities, and it's not because the president and his economic team have pursued anti-business policies. Instead, it reflects a deeper disconnect between corporate leaders and the rest of America, rooted not just in the economic privileges executives enjoy but also in the particular ways business connects to Washington. This disconnect has blinded corporate leaders to the extent to which most Americans feel that the government, far from crushing corporate America, has been looking out only for those at the top.

  Had Obama realized sooner that he would never win over corporate America, he might have pursued rhetoric and policies that would have alienated fewer voters. But the cost would have been alienating Democratic moderates in Congress, thereby jeopardizing his reform agenda. After November's inevitable Republican gains, however, those moderates will have a less decisive role, and Obama might feel freer to adopt a more populist approach.

  It seems much more likely to me that if the Democrats lose badly in November, Obama will move even further to the right, possibly even untethering himself from the Congressional Democrats viewing them as losers. This would free him from having to pursue a program tied to the Democratic Party base -- hey, we tried that, and got pounded for it! -- to focus on his own reëlection unconstrained by the party. For 2012, that would mean all he has to do is to run a hair to the side of sanity from whoever the Republicans nominate -- Huckabee is my guess, but with the gamut of hopefuls running from Romney to Palin, well, how hard is that?

• Ezra Klein: Can business afford the Republican Party? Good question. I think it's clear that business did better, even allowing for tax differences, under Clinton than Bush, but politically may be a different story.

  What business should want, in theory, is a Republican Party that advocates for its interests. That is to say, a Republican Party willing to send 20 senators and 50 House members to the table when Democrats are writing a huge health-care bill that has the votes to pass. The Democrats would've given anything for some votes from across the aisle, and whatever it is that business wanted, it could've gotten. But since the Republican Party wasn't interested in governing or negotiating, business didn't have that leverage. [ . . . ]

  My hunch is that business doesn't really care about this for two reasons. The first is that the Democrats aren't anti-business and they in fact spent a lot of time talking to representatives from the affected industries and reshaping the bill to address their concerns. The second is that the people actually representing business interests in Washington are movement Republicans rather than disinterested CEOs, and they're allied with the interests of the Republican Party in much the way that organized labor is allied with the interests of the Democratic Party. But what that means is that the GOP isn't going to come in and do what business needs them to do, but instead what their base and electoral interests tell them to do. And so uncertainty and inadequacy will rule the day.

  One of the forgotten stories of the health care reform act was that Obama got virtually all of the interested industry parties to consent to and nominally support his bill, but that translated to zero Republican votes and no political coverage for Democrats. Given how little he got for so much compromise, it can certainly be argued that he wouldn't have had any more trouble advancing a much more ambitious reform program.

  Similarly, it was the Democrats who provided the bulk of the votes to pass TARP and save the banking system, letting the Republicans in Congress posture against bailouts even while Paulson and Bush were handing them out.

• Paul Krugman/Robin Wells: The Slump Goes On: Why? and The Way Out of the Slump: Two-part book review which occasionally touches on Raghuram G Rajan: Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, Nouriel Roubini/Stephem Mihm: Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance, and Richard C Koo: The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons From Japan's Great Recession. Krugman has been saying all along that the contemporary worldwide recession is a lot like Japan's famous "lost decade" -- a long stagnant period following their own stupendous real estate bubble burst -- so it's not surprising that Koo fares best. It may also help that doctors are better at prescribing medicine to others: one little irony (or hypocrisy if you're inclined to be less generous) is that while economist Ben Bernanke argued that Japan should inflate its way out of its recession, Fed Chairman Bernanke doesn't seem to have the slightest desire to test his theory at home. Rajan's seems to be by far the worst of the three books -- although Yglesias was quick to praise the book, Rajan has mostly argued that central bankers should aggresively raise interest rates to guard against future inflation, and basically shows no concern whatsoever over unemployment rates, even if they were to get much worse. A couple quotes from the second piece:

  Nor do many people seem willing to recognize the increasingly obvious failure of austerity policies in those countries that actually have lost the confidence of bond markets: harsh policies in Greece and Ireland have led to soaring unemployment, yet investors seem less willing than ever to buy those nations' debt. As one of us has noted, supposedly responsible policymakers are sounding more and more like the priesthood of some barbaric cult, demanding sacrifices in the name of invisible gods. [ . . . ]

  One more thing: just as global imbalances -- the savings glut created by surpluses in China and other countries -- played an important part in creating the great real estate bubble, they have an important role in blocking recovery now that the bubble has burst. Koo is right in saying that the essential problem of the world economy right now is an excess of saving, with not enough borrowers; countries that continue running large trade surpluses in this environment -- like China and Germany -- are propping up their own economies at the rest of the world's expense.

• Paul Krugman: Downhill With the G.O.P.: On the Republican Party's Pledge to America:

  Never mind the war on terror, the party's main concern seems to be the war on arithmetic. [ . . . ]

  True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there's only one specific cut proposed -- canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim implausibly) would save $16 billion. That's less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified -- "except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops." In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.

  So what's left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won't cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: "No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress."

  The "pledge," then, is nonsense. [ . . . ] So the clear and present danger isn't that the G.O.P. will be able to achieve its long-run goals. It is, rather, that Republicans will gain just enough power to make the country ungovernable, unable to address its fiscal problems or anything else in a serious way. As I said, banana republic, here we come.

• Andrew Leonard: The United States of income inequality: Just another way of counting: the ratio of the share of wealth of the top 20% percent of Americans to the share under the poverty line has increased from 7.69-to-1 in 1969 to 14.5-to-1 in 2009:

  From Richard Nixon through Barack Obama, the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States has cracked wide open into a global embarrassment. Even in the wake of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, the rich have still managed to gain headway while the poor and middle class continue to lose ground. It's a remarkable record of government failure by both parties.

• Ray McGovern: Obama Knows the War Is Dumb, but Prefers Power Over Peace: Reviewing Bob Woodward's book, Obama's Wars:

  Woodward paints a personal portrait of presidential cynicism by describing a conversation between Obama and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, during which Graham asks if that July deadline is firm.

  Obama is quoted in reply, "I have to say that." He then explains, "I can't let this be a war without end, and I can't lose the whole Democratic Party."

  There is little doubt in my mind that Obama knows full well that the Afghanistan war is a fool's errand, and that the only way to end it is to disengage, rather than escalate. Yet he is convinced -- wrongly, I believe -- that the he has no real political alternative but to kowtow to the generals. [ . . . ]

  Predictably, this behavior earns Obama disdain rather than respect from the top brass, who believe the President feels "intimidated" in their presence, as Gen. Stanley McChrystal told Rolling Stone magazine earlier this year. Generals generally know there is a huge difference between being a mere politician and a real leader.

  In Obama, they see a politician first and foremost, and have concluded that his overweening determination to appear strong on defense has the result of making him putty in their hands.

• Maxine Udall: Structural Misalignment and a Counterfactual Economy: I could link to Krugman debunking the "structural unemployment" excuse but Udall has four perfectly good links in her first sentence. She isn't out to fight Krugman, but wants to consider the possibility that there is a deeper-seated structural misalignment that would be a real problem if we didn't have so many realer problems in the way. One such problem is that the lure of big finance dollars has drained so many brains from the potential pool of scientists and engineers who might actually help solve real problems.

• Matthew Yglesias: Poor People Are Much Poorer Than You Think: The chart maps dividies Americans into five quintiles by wealth, then shows how much wealth each quintile has -- the top quintile has more than 80% of the total pie, and the bottom two quintiles have essentially nothing -- then asks various groups of people to estimate how they think the pie is split. The breakdowns are pretty marginal -- higher income people, Democrats, and men think the rich are richer, but not by much. The big point is that all groups underestimate the top quintile's share by 20-25 points, and that they all assume that the bottom 40% has 8-10% of the wealth where they actually have 0%. As Yglesias points out, such common failure to recognize how poor the poor really are is the big story here.