Krugman and Kristol

William “I’ve never been right about anything” Kristol typed a thing called “McCain’s Exceptionalism.”  Grasping at straws he says that three developments this past week were promising for John McCain, or what amounts to pretty much the same thing, problematic for Barack Obama.  Mr. Krugman says folks are “Stranded in Suburbia,” and that with rising oil prices leaving many Americans stranded in suburbia, it’s starting to look as if Berlin, a city of trains, buses and bikes, had the better idea.  Here’s that idiot Kristol, whistling past the graveyard:

Last Tuesday, Republicans lost another Congressional seat in a special election — their third such defeat in two months. On Wednesday I received an acerbic e-mail message from a disgusted young G.O.P. loyalist: “I just have to say that Republicans are a dumb party that chooses stupid candidates. With the exception of McCain.” Who says the young lack wisdom? In fact, Republican hopes of denying Democrats complete control of the federal government for the next couple of years may rest on the promise of “McCain exceptionalism.”

The Republican Party is clearly in bad shape — trailing by double digits in party preference among the electorate, very likely to lose House and Senate seats in the fall. But John McCain — despite a rather haphazard campaign so far lacking in thematic coherence — is doing pretty well. In two public tracking polls, by Gallup and Rasmussen, he’s basically even with Barack Obama; other polls have him slightly behind.

What’s more, three developments this past week were promising for McCain — or what amounts to pretty much the same thing, problematic for Obama.

1. On Tuesday night, while the G.O.P. Congressional candidate was losing in a Mississippi district George Bush carried in 2004 by 25 points, Barack Obama was being trounced in the West Virginia Democratic primary — by 41 points. I can’t find a single recent instance of a candidate who ultimately became his party’s nominee losing a primary by this kind of margin. The crucial swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania (whose primaries Obama also lost to Hillary Clinton) have a fair number of West Virginia-type working-class, culturally conservative voters. The Obama campaign can’t be confident about his prospects there in the fall.

2. On Thursday, the California Supreme Court did precisely what much of the American public doesn’t want judges doing: it made social policy from the bench. With a 4-to-3 majority, the judges chose not to defer to a ballot initiative approved by 61 percent of California voters eight years ago, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman. In 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court redefined marriage in that state, helping to highlight the issues of same-sex marriage and judicial activism for the 2004 presidential campaign. Now the California court has conveniently stepped up to the plate.

Obama’s campaign issued a statement that its candidate “respects the decision of the California Supreme Court.” The McCain campaign, by contrast, said it recognized “the right of the people of California to recognize marriage as a unique institution … John McCain doesn’t believe judges should be making these decisions.” Since the next president will almost certainly have one Supreme Court appointment, and could have two or three, this difference on judicial philosophy could well matter to voters — and in a way that should help McCain.

Furthermore, the action of the California court will remind voters of the Defense of Marriage Act, which says a state is not required to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and which was passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton in 1996. McCain voted for and supports it. Obama opposes it.

3. It was also on Thursday that President Bush spoke before Israel’s Knesset. He denounced those who “seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” This “foolish delusion,” Bush claimed, yields “the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

Obama took Bush to be alluding to Obama’s willingness to meet, without preconditions, with Iran and North Korea, and attacked Bush. The conventional view in Washington is that Obama was smart to pick a fight with the unpopular Bush. And when McCain intervened, Obama was able to attack Bush and McCain in the same breath. But over the longer term, it can’t be in Obama’s interest to divert voters from a focus on gas prices or health care to the question of what he hopes to achieve by negotiating with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

If you talk to political pros in D.C. these days, you’ll hear them say that “gravity” — voters’ apparently settled low opinion of the Republican Party — will eventually drag McCain down. Perhaps. But we know that a Republican presidential candidate can win as his party loses.

From 1968 through 1988, we had six presidential elections. During that time, Democrats won the Congressional vote by an average of more than 10 points; they controlled the House of Representatives for all of that period, and the Senate for most of it. But the Republican presidential candidate won five of those six contests — four of them (1972, 1980, 1984 and 1988) easily. This year’s election could see a return to this cold-war model — a strong-on-national-security and supporter-of-middle-American-values Republican presidential candidate prevailing, while at the same time voters choose a Democratic Congress. Last week’s developments — in West Virginia, Sacramento and Jerusalem — have increased the odds of such an outcome.

Here’s Mr. Krugman:

I have seen the future, and it works.

O.K., I know that these days you’re supposed to see the future in China or India, not in the heart of “old Europe.”

But we’re living in a world in which oil prices keep setting records, in which the idea that global oil production will soon peak is rapidly moving from fringe belief to mainstream assumption. And Europeans who have achieved a high standard of living in spite of very high energy prices — gas in Germany costs more than $8 a gallon — have a lot to teach us about how to deal with that world.

If Europe’s example is any guide, here are the two secrets of coping with expensive oil: own fuel-efficient cars, and don’t drive them too much.

Notice that I said that cars should be fuel-efficient — not that people should do without cars altogether. In Germany, as in the United States, the vast majority of families own cars (although German households are less likely than their U.S. counterparts to be multiple-car owners).

But the average German car uses about a quarter less gas per mile than the average American car. By and large, the Germans don’t drive itsy-bitsy toy cars, but they do drive modest-sized passenger vehicles rather than S.U.V.’s and pickup trucks.

In the near future I expect we’ll see Americans moving down the same path. We’ve already done it once: over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the average mileage of U.S. passenger vehicles rose about 50 percent, as Americans switched to smaller, lighter cars.

This improvement stalled with the rise of S.U.V.’s during the cheap-gas 1990s. But now that gas costs more than ever before, even after adjusting for inflation, we can expect to see mileage rise again.

Admittedly, the next few years will be rough for families who bought big vehicles when gas was cheap, and now find themselves the owners of white elephants with little trade-in value. But raising fuel efficiency is something we can and will do.

Can we also drive less? Yes — but getting there will be a lot harder.

There have been many news stories in recent weeks about Americans who are changing their behavior in response to expensive gasoline — they’re trying to shop locally, they’re canceling vacations that involve a lot of driving, and they’re switching to public transit.

But none of it amounts to much. For example, some major public transit systems are excited about ridership gains of 5 or 10 percent. But fewer than 5 percent of Americans take public transit to work, so this surge of riders takes only a relative handful of drivers off the road.

Any serious reduction in American driving will require more than this — it will mean changing how and where many of us live.

To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.

And in the face of rising oil prices, which have left many Americans stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas — it’s starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea.

Changing the geography of American metropolitan areas will be hard. For one thing, houses last a lot longer than cars. Long after today’s S.U.V.’s have become antique collectors’ items, millions of people will still be living in subdivisions built when gas was $1.50 or less a gallon.

Infrastructure is another problem. Public transit, in particular, faces a chicken-and-egg problem: it’s hard to justify transit systems unless there’s sufficient population density, yet it’s hard to persuade people to live in denser neighborhoods unless they come with the advantage of transit access.

And there are, as always in America, the issues of race and class. Despite the gentrification that has taken place in some inner cities, and the plunge in national crime rates to levels not seen in decades, it will be hard to shake the longstanding American association of higher-density living with poverty and personal danger.

Still, if we’re heading for a prolonged era of scarce, expensive oil, Americans will face increasingly strong incentives to start living like Europeans — maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives.