01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, April 25, 2004

When the facts change, I change my opinion.

-- John Maynard Keynes

No wonder Keynes made a lot of money in the stock market, even during the Depression.

What most people in the commentary business will say about any politician or public policy is set in concrete,from Paul Krugman, on the left, to Cal Thomas, on the right. An entrepreneur, a scientist or a physician is far more likely to publicly change opinions than is a pundit, or a politician.

I used to think that this is because of deeply held "principles." But now I don't think it usually is. And it rarely has much to do with opinions arrived at through vast study.

Rather, political positions depend heavily on the identification with certain people early in the commentators' or politicians' lives -- on how they were treated or mistreated then by family and other associates -- and, in their present lives, on the mutual comfort and self-congratulation in groups united by the agreeable assailing of the same "crooks" or "idiots."

Then there's the commercial potential of selling oneself as a "conservative" or "liberal" -- however meaningless those labels are in the daily practice of politics and government, where horse trading almost always trumps "beliefs." News-media-company marketing departments desperately want labels to help sell their "personalities," and straw devils to bayonet as the cameras whir.

Thus, for instance, pundits assign immense powers of good and evil over the economy to the president, whoever that may be. To say (accurately) that presidents don't really have much power over the economy would deprive too many commentators of ammunition.

But then, you see remarkably few people reading both The Nation and The National Review. Too anxiety-provoking. We want the soothing voices of the amen chorus.

The number of true loners is low in politics and political commentary. We need a lot more of them.

-- Robert Whitcomb