NYT columnist Paul Krugman was on Stephanopoulos' show Sunday, taking the same whacks at Obama as he did in last Friday's column: that Obama's policy proposals on the mortgage meltdown are wimpier and less progressive than Clinton's--as he describes it, incentives vs. a revived New Deal type approach. As Krugman also noted, that's pretty much his take on their health care plans, Obama's allegedly less progressive, and he's gone after Obama for that in a couple of columns.

Fine--I probably agree with him on heath care, though I don't remotely think that makes Obama the less progressive (or electable) candidate. Anyway, all in all--he's written other pro-Clinton columns--Krugman seems solidly in Clinton's corner.

So I've been wondering where Krugman is on another of his signature issues: race-baiting in presidential politics. Last week Hillary Clinton set up a meeting with hyper-conservative Richard Mellon Scaife, publisher of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review newspaper, to try to scrounge up some White backlash votes in Pennsylvania by raising, once more, the fading Jeremiah Wright issue. Clinton knew Scaife would be receptive since his American Spectator published false rumors that Bill Clinton had fathered a Black child, and Scaife foundations have funded pseudo-think tanks that peddle racist drivel re-packaged as conservative policy analysis.

The Scaife meeting was just the latest instance of the Clintons using race and "otherness" to try to knock down Obama, since they've failed to do it on substance. From Bill Clinton's "Jesse Jackson won here, too" comments in South Carolina on primary day, to Hillary Clinton's response to a question on "60 Minutes" that Obama is not a Muslim "as far as I know" (the query itself prompted by dirty tricks by her campaign to suggest exactly that), etc., race-baiting has become the Clinton's go-to tactic of choice since their "inevitable nominee" strategy collapsed.

And they've been doing it for exactly the same reason Republican strategists like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove did: to drive White working and middle class voters away from a more progressive candidate. The tactic became especially important to Clinton after Obama took a majority of such voters in Virginia and Maryland. As always, the goal is to split the electorate racially and conquer by dividing.

Now, I would think Krugman would take that as a shot straight across his journalistic bows.

In recent months Krugman has written columns citing race-baiting as a crucial tactic for Ronald Reagan, who opened his 1980 campaign with a call for "states' rights" in Philadelphia, Miss., site of an infamous civil rights-era triple murder. He's noted that race-baiting has been a decisive factor in Republican presidential wins going back to Nixon. He's even declared that appeals to racism are fundamental in modern Republican conservatism.

And the crucial importance of race-baiting in American politics is a central theme of Krugman's latest book, "Conscience of a Liberal." There, he not only declares that the race-baiting of (especially Southern) White voters has been the basis for the modern Republican dominacy of the presidency, but that racism in American electoral politics is the single issue that best explains why the U.S., alone among advanced nations, lacks a comprehensive welfare state safeguarding the basic life interests of its citizens.

So the more Krugman has thought and written about the decisive factors in modern American politics, and especially the forces that explain the rise of reactionary policies and the eclipse of the progressive, he's fingered racist appeals that split the working and middle classes against their own best interests as a prime culprit.

Except, I'm starting to conclude, when the race-baiter is his preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton.

A couple of fairly obvious questions: Are the real but arguably minor policy differences between Obama and Clinton, which Krugman has argued will make an Obama presidency significantly less progressive, really more imperiling to the creation of a broad and successful new progressive coalition than Clinton's enthusiastic resuscitation of exactly the tactics Republicans have used to keep progressivism at bay for the past 40 years? Is an electoral strategy that seeks to divide working and middle class voters, once again, into those self-destructive warring camps so drearily familar from the Reagan-Bush years really likely to be a winner for progressives--whether in the general election or even after a Democratic victory?

I'm a huge fan of Krugman, usually the most incisive and prescient columnist out there. So where is he on Hillary Clinton's' race-baiting? Seems like news to me.