Enter the world of Paul Krugman, a world either dark (the eras of Bush I and Bush II) or bathed in light (when Bill was king). "What do you think of the French Revolution?" someone is supposed to have asked Zhou En-lai. "Too soon to tell," Zhou laconically riposted. Krugman entertains no such prudence. Near the beginning of his collection of columns, The Great Unraveling, Krugman looks back on Clinton time. A throb enters his voice. He becomes a Hesiod, basking in the golden age.

"At the beginning of the new millennium, then, it seemed that the United States was blessed with mature, skillful economic leaders, who in a pinch would do what had to be done. They would insist on responsible fiscal policies; they would act quickly and effectively to prevent a repeat of the jobless recovery of the early 90s, let alone a slide into Japanese-style stagnation. Even those of us who considered ourselves pessimists were basically optimists: we thought that bullish investors might face a rude awakening, but that it would all have a happy ending." A few lines later: "What happened to the good years?" A couple of hundred pages later: "How did we get here? How did the American political system, which produced such reasonable economic leadership during the 1990s, lead us into our current morass of dishonesty and irresponsibility?"

Across the past three years Krugman has become the Democrats' Clark Kent. A couple of times each week he bursts onto the New York Times Op-Ed page in his blue jumpsuit, shoulders aside the Geneva Conventions and whacks the bad guys.

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