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Digby flagged this segment from this Sunday's Fareed Zakaria GPS, and as she noted, Zakaria seems to be singing a very different tune now on whether austerity is popular with the masses in Europe than he was four years ago. And as she noted, being wrong never seems to get anyone kicked out of the club once you've gained entry as one of the Very Serious People by our corporate media.

Fareed Zakaria four years ago in a post called The Center Holds: In Britain even pain is popular":

Three weeks ago the new chancellor, 39-year-old Tory George Osborne, presented a budget that promised to get Britain’s fiscal house in order with sharp cuts in spending, coupled with tax increases. It landed in the midst of a heated debate across the industrialized world about how to best get the economy back on track. Osborne and his boss, Prime Minister David Cameron, have come down firmly on one side of this debate, hoping that a major effort to reduce the deficit will reassure bond markets and investors that Britain is a safe and compelling place to put their money.

Leaving aside the economics of this, what struck me as I spent time in Britain last week was the politics of deficit reduction. Having announced major cuts in popular programs, plus hefty tax increases, the Cameron government might be expected to be losing popularity by the day. But in fact the budget was well received by the public—though attacked ferociously from the left—and the governing coalition has actually inched up a bit in the polls.

There are several possible reasons for this. Cameron has played the public role of prime minister exceedingly well, making a pitch-perfect apology for the British Army’s wrongful use of force in Northern Ireland in 1972, and handling himself on the global stage with grace and ease. It’s also true, of course, that the effect of the cuts and taxes have not yet been felt, and when that happens, the government’s poll ratings might plunge. But clearly the honesty of the budget has resonated with voters.

It’s heartening to see a government do something that it must have thought would be deeply unpopular, and then be rewarded by the public...

I love this description of how he reacted to the commentary from his guests. Potted plant indeed:

Zakaria still rails against "entitlements" (which his earlier guest Stephen Haas described as a "cancer" to no objection from anyone) but he hasn't exactly come clean about the disastrous effects of the austerity measures in Europe that "heartened him" so strongly, has he? No, today he sits there like a potted plant while the bill of indictment rolls right over him.

But then he's a card-carrying Very Serious Person which means never having to say you're sorry.

Ain't that the truth? I don't always get a chance to watch all of his show every week, but I don't recall seeing him doing much to rebut that flawed economic study by Reinhart and Rogoff which the right has used to justify austerity as well. Most of our corporate media has done their best to ignore that, even as many of them, as Zakaria was here, have finally been forced to admit that maybe that whole push for austerity isn't working out so well.

Full transcript below the fold.

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It seems Lawrence O'Donnell isn't the only one who believes the Democrats might have to take the country over the so-called "fiscal cliff" to manage to get any cooperation from Republicans in actually trying to govern the country. Here's Paul Krugman's response on this week's Fareed Zakaria GPS:

ZAKARIA: Final issue, fiscal cliff. Do you -- I assume you think it would be a bad thing, a drag on the GDP.

ROGOFF: Yeah, yeah.

ZAKARIA: Do you think it's likely to happen?

ROGOFF: No, but I'm not sure because it's so divisive, and one side or the other may see a gain. I have no idea what's going to come out of it. I think the clear thing is we don't know which direction they're going to turn if they don't go off the cliff. Are they going to get higher taxes, lower government spending, some combination. I have no idea. And that uncertainty weighs very heavily on businesses right now.

KRUGMAN: Well, I mean, it's a game of chicken. And I actually think if Obama's re-elected, I think that there's a quite good chance that for a month or two we actually will go off the cliff, which doesn't do that much harm. It's brief, because I think Obama if he is re-elected, he has to say government by blackmail, it's not an acceptable way to run this country. And so, I'm going to call you guys bluff and let the people who are paying for your campaigns come running and demanding that you make a compromise with me. So I actually -- I would put, you know, pretty substantial odds that we will in fact, at least temporarily, see those rates go up. And then -- then it's a different game.

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Fareed Zakaria read his recent article at Time Magazine during the opening of his show on CNN this Sunday and while I take issue with his idea of who the "experts" that Romney should be enlisting on foreign policy are, he's exactly right that Romney is doubling down on the very policies that have made President Obama unpopular -- our lopsided support for Israel and the use of drones to go after so-called terrorists.

Failure to Launch:

Mitt Romney picked a bad day to launch a blistering attack on Barack Obama's foreign policy. As Romney was speaking to the annual gathering of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, charging Obama with weakness, betrayal and mendacity, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal released a new poll. It turns out that on "handling of foreign policy," Americans prefer Obama to Romney by 15 points.

Romney's principal charge against Obama is that he has angered America's allies and emboldened its enemies. Again, it turns out that some recently released data contradict the claim. The Pew Foundation released one of its global surveys in June, soliciting opinions from several countries around the world. When asked if they have "some" or a "great deal of" trust in President Obama, the numbers are overwhelmingly positive. In Britain, for example, which is Romney's first stop on his foreign tour, 80% of people trust Obama, compared with 16% who trusted George W. Bush. All countries surveyed have much higher approval ratings of America in 2012 than they did in 2008, when Bush was President. (It's fair to note that the numbers have come down from their 2009 highs, just after Obama's Inauguration, when expectations were soaring.) [...]

There are parts of the world where approval rates for Obama have dropped significantly and where America is viewed with suspicion. They include Russia, China and the countries of the Arab world. This would suggest that Obama has not given these countries what they want, thus earning their disfavor. That is precisely what Romney seems to want in his speech--approval from allies and disapproval from adversaries.

And consider the reasons Obama's ratings are low in the Arab world. The two strongest justifications given by people in every Arab country that was surveyed are, first, that he has not been fair in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and second, that he has used drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan to go after terrorists. In other words, the reason Obama has lost some of his global popularity is that he is perceived as too pro-Israeli and too hawkish. [...]

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Here we go again with former Sen. Alan Simpson slamming his fists on the table, demanding that our politicians agree to make some form of "grand bargain" later this year and berating Republicans for their fear of Grover Norquist coming after them if they aren't loyal to his anti-tax pledge.

As Ross Eisenbrey reminds us this week, Simpson is no hero when it comes to his plans for our social safety nets: Alan Simpson isn’t ‘saving Social Security’:

Alan Simpson is at it again. Launching another off-color attack on people who oppose the Bowles-Simpson plan to bomb Social Security in order to save it, Simpson claims he is saving it for young people who would otherwise be “gutted.” In fact, Simpson’s overarching desire to protect rich Americans from paying their fair share of Social Security taxes (if wealthy earners paid FICA taxes on all of their income, most of Social Security’s solvency problems would be solved) leads him to propose cuts in Social Security almost as large as the automatic benefit reductions that will occur in 2033 under current assumptions.

According to an analysis of the Bowles-Simpson plan by Social Security’s chief actuary, middle-class workers with average earnings over the course of their careers (around $43,084 in 2010) would see a 22 percent cut in benefits by 2080, not significantly different from the 23.5 percent cut in benefits these workers would face if nothing were done to shore up Social Security’s finances. Our children and grandchildren will lose critical benefits under Simpson’s plan, while seniors like him are mostly protected.

Notwithstanding Simpson’s crocodile tears for young people, under the Bowles-Simpson plan, if someone who is born in 2015 retires at age 65 with a middle-class income in 2080, Social Security will replace only 28 percent of their pre-retirement earnings. By contrast, a 65-year old who retired in 1980 replaced 49 percent of pre-retirement earnings. It is Simpson himself who wants to gut the Social Security of coming generations.

That didn't stop CNN's Fareed Zakaria from treating Alan Simpson and his fellow commission head Erskine Bowles as some sort of heroes during his interview with them this Sunday. If they really wanted to make sure Social Security remains solvent, as Ross noted, they'd lift the income cap instead of using the hole they blew in the budget with the Bush tax cuts and two wars they refused to pay for as an excuse to gut our social safety nets.

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