Speaking of The New York Times, and Mr. Krugman, his column appears on today’s Op-Ed page, across from William Kristol’s. Mr. Kristol’s column, entitled, Fire the Campaign, offers this observation:

“The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.”

He is, of course, correct. The McCain campaign, McCain himself, is a picture of erratic ignorance. Senator McCain is not an unintelligent man, but one who consistently makes poor and ill-informed, if not outright uninformed decisions. 

Kristol continues, essentially making the argument against McCain, and stating McCain

“…should tell the truth — we’re in uncharted waters, no one is certain what to do, and no one knows what the situation will be on Jan. 20, 2009. But what we do know is that we could use someone as president who’s shown in his career the kind of sound judgment and strong leadership we’ll need to make it through the crisis.”

As is often the case, Kristol is just wrong (as is evidenced here, here, especially here, and, oh heck, just look here), and now wrong in insisting “no one is certain what to do”. Read (now) Nobel-winning Paul Krugman’s piece, “Gordon Does Good“, in which he writes:

“…the Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions. And this combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn’t been matched by any other Western government, least of all our own.”

Right now, the DOW is up almost 600 points, following similar increases in European and Asian markets. The general consensus is that this weekend’s G7 meeting was sufficiently successful, and the huge infusion of capital is calming fears enough to give the markets some stability. Krugman continues:

“At a special European summit meeting on Sunday, the major economies of continental Europe in effect declared themselves ready to follow Britain’s lead, injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into banks while guaranteeing their debts. And whaddya know, Mr. Paulson — after arguably wasting several precious weeks — has also reversed course, and now plans to buy equity stakes rather than bad mortgage securities (although he still seems to be moving with painful slowness).”

Once again, the Right (McCain) and its mired-in-the-mud proponents (Kristol) miss the point, which is this: it takes intelligent leaders who are willing to gather information and informed and intelligent advisors, (such as prime minister Gordon Brown, and as Senator Obama have done,) and consider other perspectives to move the ball forward. And it shouldn’t take a Nobel-winner to see this simple truth. Unfortunately, Senator McCain hasn’t, and most likely never will.