The Mistake of 2010 is an opinion piece by Paul Krugman.

Somehow it became conventional wisdom that the deficit, not unemployment, was Public Enemy No. 1 — a conventional wisdom both reflected in and reinforced by a dramatic shift in news coverage away from unemployment and toward deficit concerns. Job creation effectively dropped off the agenda.

Beside the substance of Krugman’s piece, which is very worthwhile to understand, I come back to the question of how the “somehow” in the above paragraph came to be.

This somehow comes back to my major complaint about how President Obama and the rest of the Democrats have been handling the key role of a politician, and that is to educate the public about the important matters of the day.  Sure politicians have to make important policy decisions.  However, it would be much easier to make the political decisions if the electorate were strongly and vocally supporting the correct decisions.  The only way for that to happen is to make sure that people are properly educated about which path is the right one and which is the wrong one.

The Republicans may honestly believe that the way to create more jobs and stimulate the economy is through cuts in government and cuts in taxes.  It is the job of the Democrats to make sure that the public understands why such a policy is a disaster as far as promoting job growth.  It is not enough to make sure people know what the Democrats want to do.  It is more important for the public to know why.

With the Republicans lack of numbers in the Senate (and past lack in the House), they have been aware that winning the public debate among the pundits is their best strategy.  The Democrats, except for the likes of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Dennis Kucinich, seem to think that their job as politicians seems to start and stop with their negotiations within the halls of Congress.

During an electoral campaign, the Democrats sometimes seem to understand the need to “educate” the electorate in order to get elected.  After the election they make the mistake of saying “the time for politics is over, now we have to govern.”  A necessary and valuable part of governing is the politics of keeping the electorate educated about the decisions you need to make.  The Republicans, on the other hand, seem to have figured out that politics is something that needs to continue after the election is over.  There is a reason why President Theodore Roosevelt talked about using the bully pulpit that went with his office.

The point about a politician’s job of educating the public was made by Klaus Schwab at the very end of his interview as noted in Interview of Klaus Schwab, Chairman, World Economic Forum.