WATCH – FROM 2010 Every politician in Washington has a constituency. That consti

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/lacking-all-conviction/KRUGMAN WATCH – FROM 2010

Every politician in Washington has a constituency. That constituency is profoundly either conservative and/or moderate. Liberals are, and likely always will be, a small minority of the population.

As a politician in a Democracy, when your constituents of all flavors start calling, contributing to others coffers, and reducing contribution to yours. When key contributors call with displeasure. When mail full of fury piles on your desk. When lobbyists start spending time with the opposing party. When the friends and allies you need to gain political support at home start abandoning you, then you have a certain perception of reality.

Democracy is not getting what you want. It’s getting what the majority of people want. Not even what the party in control wants. But what the majority of people want.

The political information system is not ideologically based except in the popular press. It is extraordinarily functional in practice – the construct of alliances of people of different desires and ideals. The political economy is run by donations and relationships. These people know what’s said in the popular press. But they live in the political economy of relationships and donations. That’s their ‘reality’. That is their ‘pricing system’: the information system that they rely upon.

They are not stupid. They are not cowards. They are pragmatic. And the voters are telling them what they think: that the country is center right. And voting against the previous administration was not voting for this one. And this administration did something few have done, and none should do: pass ideological legislation over the objection of the majority.

THis congress will fall. And the president will either move toward the center. Or he will be out in two years. And while he is a weak character, he is probably not stupid enough to stay so far left. And he has lost his legitimacy with the populace and as such, oratorical appeals to left agendas will only serve to undermine his power further.