Confessions of a New York Times Liberal

You argue that immigration contributes to inequality--but not because immigrants depress wages. How, then?
The initial impact is that a growing proportion of low-wage workers are disenfranchised, and that pushes politics to the right. But as [immigrants] naturalize and their children become part of the electorate, it's quite devastating for the prospects of the Republican Party as it exists. Twenty years from now, you will have a lot of voters who aren't going to vote in ways that the white Republican base does. George Allen's “macaca” moment, when the senator used an obscure racial epithet against a South Asian, was the quintessential sign of how politics had changed … Virginia would not stand for it. It looks as if that style of politics, which dominated the U.S. for these past 30 years, is now shrinking toward a kind of rump—just the inner parts of the Old Confederacy. [Former Georgia governor] Zell Miller wrote a book entitled "A National Party No More." But he got the wrong party.

You're a trained academic economist. Did you have any qualms about delving more into areas in which you're not professionally trained, like history and foreign policy?
Not a day goes by when I think my life would be more comfortable if the Times hadn't offered me the job [of columnist]. This book started because I was trying to figure out what happened economically. I spent a lot of time trying to understand it. And I did run stuff by people to make sure I wasn't making any outrageous bloopers.

If Al Gore had been elected with a Republican Congress in 2000, would we be where we are in terms of health care and income inequality?
I'm kind of a fatalist. Gore would not have had enough political clout to really change the direction. In the 1990s, between the compression of costs and a booming job market, health-care anxiety was low enough that after the Clinton failure you couldn't get a reform effort started. The countertrends, the things that are making for this new progressive era, have only really started to come to fruition in the last few years.

You argue that so-called movement conservatives oppose programs like Social Security and universal health care because they're invested in the idea that government programs can't and shouldn't work for the middle class. Is this same impulse behind President Bush's veto of the bipartisan measure to expand the SCHIP program of Medicare?
The trouble with SCHIP from Bush's point of view is that it works too well. SCHIP, in providing necessary health care for kids, would lead people to say, why not more? We have Medicaid for the poorest kids. Why should any child in the U.S. be without health insurance? And you can see where that line goes. So he's chosen to make his fight over 12-year-old kids.

President Bush and modern Republicans have been good for you—providing you with endless column and book ideas. And yet the administration also makes you angry. What would you rather have: the material, or your pre-Bush peace of mind?
In some ways, Bush bashing draws less adulation than it did a few years ago, because he's on the ropes. I have to pinch myself sometimes, because it was just a little less than three years ago that everybody was explaining that liberalism was dead and we were bound to have a permanent Republican majority. But I'll take it. I'll be enormously relieved when this guy is no longer sitting in the White House.

© 2007