Krugman asks, and answers "politics" (that is, right wing bromides like "government is the problem"). Of course:

1. Obama hasn't done anything to fight the right wing bromides and has, if anything, reinforced them; and

2. Why would on earth would anybody imagine that the FKDP has any other constituency than Big Money, Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and all the other Mr. Bigs?

NOTE Anyhow, high unemployment encourages those slaves who have wages to work all the harder and accept more abuse, so what's not to like?

UPDATE Jeebus, who kidnapped Paul Krugman. Gently chiding Obama for his "caution," Krugman writes:

Meanwhile, the Democratic base, so energized last year, has lost much of its passion, at least partly because the administration’s soft-touch approach to Wall Street has seemed to many like a betrayal of their ideals.

First, in what universe is the largest transfer of wealth in world history -- $22 trillion to the banksters with no accountability and no transparecy -- a "soft touch"? Second, since when did Krugman start incorporating weasel words like "seemed to many like a betrayal"? Are they right, or wrong?

UPDATE But then there's this:

Obama's trap
Back in the first few months of the current administration ... what I had very much in my mind ... was the possibility of a sort of political economy trap. If unemployment continued to rise, I feared, Congress wouldn’t draw the right conclusion — that we needed more stimulus. Instead, the verdict would be that Obama’s economic policies weren’t working, so we needed to do less. And high unemployment would also lead to Democratic electoral losses, further undermining the ability to act (since the fact is that today’s GOP is the party of economic ignorance). The result would be a persistently depressed economy, and a fading out of Obama’s promise [if any].

I really, really wish I had been wrong about this — and for a while, as banks seemed to regain their footing and stocks went up, it looked as if the administration’s softly, softly policy might work out after all. But on the things that truly matter, above all jobs, reality has played out even worse than I feared. Today the unemployment rate passed 10%, a sort of brutal milestone. ...

Who’s to blame? The buck stops with the president. But did his economic advisers make it clear to him that the proposed stimulus was way short of what the math suggested we needed, even given what was known in January? Or was Mr. Obama really led to believe that his stimulus proposal was as bold as he claimed it was?

I don’t know. But I’ve got a sick feeling about the whole situation.

And Krugman's got a job!

I think we really need to stop making a few asumptions.

1. Stop assuming that that the FKDP has any other constituency than the Mr. Bigs of the economy and the "creative class" that services them through symbol creation and manipulation.

2. Stop assuming that elected officials regard their offices as anything other than, at best, Plan A. Plan B is always there: A job as a lobbyist on K street, punditry, or the various forms of shilling available to anybody who has a job. We're not dealing with elected representatives, here. We're dealing with made men (and women). Really, suppose the Obama administration went tits up tomorrow; would that affect Obama in any substantive way? Nah. He's made. He's got the book deals, the speeches, the appearances on Oprah -- everything that goes with being a celebrity commodity in a celebrity culture. There's really very little we can do, right now, to hold elected officials accountable for anything. So, for us there's a trap. For our leaders, there's no trap at all: Only opportunities. And so it goes!