Conservative economist and media figure Larry Kudlow says he’s talked to national Republicans about running for Senate in Connecticut.This is not the first time Kudlow has made such a threat. In 2009 he said he might run against Connecticut Senate Chris Dodd the following year. Dodd chose not to run, leaving an open seat, but Kudlow skipped the race. He also considered a run in 2010 in New York against Chuck Schumer, but he passed up that race as well. At the time, both Gawker and The New York Observer asserted that Roger Stone, the veteran Republican dirty trickster and sleazebag, was backing Kudlow.
During an interview on his radio program with Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., over the weekend, Kudlow said he would mount a challenge to incumbent Sen. Richard Blumenthal if the Democrat supports the international agreement with Iran over its nuclear program.
Kudlow famously spent years predicting that the Great Recession wouldn't happen, and then asserting that it wouldn't really be that bad. This was a serious failing, considering that understanding economics and the financial markets was, y'know, his job. As Salon's Andrew Leonard noted, Kudlow was wrong about this as far back as 2005, when he wrote:
Homebuilders led the stock parade this week with a fantastic 11 percent gain. This is a group that hedge funds and bubbleheads love to hate. All the bond bears have been dead wrong in predicting sky-high mortgage rates . So have all the bubbleheads who expect housing-price crashes in Las Vegas or Naples, Florida, to bring down the consumer, the rest of the economy, and the entire stock market.(Emphasis added.) I quote this because the sentence in bold is precisely what did happen.
The Huffington Post's Mark Nickolas gathered together some of the pronouncements Kudlow made as the markets were on the verge of imploding. A few highlights:
October 3, 2007:And when he's not being wrong about the economy, he's wrong about politics. On August 1, 2008, a few weeks before John McCain announced the identity of his running mate, Kudlow wrote this:
The recession forecast is all but wiped out....
November 21, 2007:
Too much is being made of both the sub-prime credit problem and the housing downturn.
... It's just not that big a deal.
December 5, 2007:
The recession debate is over. It's not gonna happen. Time to move on.
December 6, 2007:
There ain’t no recession.
December 7, 2007:
There's no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong. It's not going to happen.... The Bush boom is alive and well. It's finishing up its sixth consecutive year with more to come. Yes, it's still the greatest story never told.
December 10, 2007:
This sort of fiscal and monetary coordination will continue the Bush boom for years to come. Though mainstream media outlets will never admit it, President Bush has kept America safe and prosperous.
February 5, 2008:
I'm going to bet that the economy will be rebounding sometime this summer, if not sooner. We are in a slow patch. That's all. It's nothing to get up in arms about.
April 7, 2008:
And let's also remember that recessions are therapeutic.... If anything, recessions make for clean starts.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has exactly the high energy, political toughness, and conservative reform message that would boost Sen. John McCain’s presidential run if Big Mac were to put her on the ticket.After her convention speech, he wrote:
Sarah Palin shows us all that she is a superb communicator, which of course is so essential to a successful politician.... A Western frontier version of Thatcher? Gosh, does the Republican Party need her.Kudlow will probably go down in history as the only person ever to call Sarah Palin "disciplined."
Watching her phenomenal communication skill, and her disciplined yet positive style, I can’t help but be optimistic.
Yeah, Connecticut GOP? You want to run this guy? A guy who even attacks the Pope when the Pope criticizes capitalism? Be my guest.
9 comments:
Of all of the pundits whose name begins with "K," the only one who's been right has been Krugman.
Kristol, Krauthammer, and Kudlow have an unblemished record, if you consider being right a blemish.
So, thaaaaat's what Warmonger never-served-a-day Peter Roskam was doing instead of meeting with me and 20 other anti-Iran War protesters at his West Chicago Office.
He's a shoo-in with the Too-short-pants-and-argyle-socks crowd.
Kudlow was also quite a piece of work back in the Reagan 80s. The late great SPY magazine (available in full on Google Books, happily) had a long article about Kidlow back then, and this guy, who was a trusted economic advisor to the Reagan WH, was also a full-blown cocaine addict, to the point of psychosis, who had to go "rest" in discreet private hospitals for stretches at a time. By the time of the Black Monday crash of 1987, he was a basket case. There were other instances of professional and personal malfeasance that I am not recalling right now. But after reading that article long ago, it's been uh, interesting to see how he's"rehabilitated" himself, or rather the media and establishment forgives him all past sins, and staggering wrongness on everything.
It's okay if you're a Republican, right?
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