If you want to understand Howard Dean, read Paul Krugman. Krugman, who has compiled more than three years of columns for The New York Times (and some for Slate and Fortune) in ''The Great Unraveling,'' is to liberal journalism what Dean is to Democratic politics. Like Dean, Krugman is a relative newcomer to his field: Dean practiced medicine for a decade before running for office; Krugman enjoyed a highly successful academic career (he's still an economics professor at Princeton) before becoming a columnist. These unusual career paths have left both men with a sense of themselves as outsiders in their current professions. In particular, both Dean and Krugman are acutely aware -- and proud -- of not living in Washington.
This self-conscious distance from their colleagues is crucial to both men's emergence as what one might call ''accidental radicals.'' In the 1990's, neither Dean nor Krugman would have been obvious liberal-left standard bearers. Dean's fiscal conservatism angered many liberal Vermonters, and Krugman's unabashed support for free trade elicited attacks from the antiglobalization movement. But over the last year, both men have been radicalized by the presidency of George W. Bush -- more specifically, by the political and journalistic elite's docile response to the presidency of George W. Bush. Just as Dean caught fire by attacking Washington Democrats for acquiescing to upper-income tax cuts and the Iraq war, Krugman has repeatedly railed against Washington journalists -- including liberal Washington journalists -- for rationalizing and minimizing the Bush administration's extremism. ''During the first two years of the Bush administration, many pundits insisted that the radical conservative bent of that administration was only a temporary maneuver,'' he writes in his introduction. ''I was ahead of the curve in realizing that something radical was happening. As a professional economist, I was in a position to appreciate the disconnect between official claims and reality; as a media outsider I wasn't part of the Washington culture, in which it's considered bad form to suggest that leading politicians have ulterior motives that bear little resemblance to their stated goals.''
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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/books/review/05BEINART.html
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