Okay, day after Christmas, back at it. Paul Krugman graced us with this in yesterday’s New York Times:

…President-elect Barack Obama, riding a wave of revulsion over what conservatism has wrought, has said that he wants to “make government cool again.”

Before Mr. Obama can make government cool, however, he has to make it good.

True enough, as the last eight years have stripped a lot of the “good” out of government. For inspiration, Krugman looks to the New Deal and the wave of reforms swept in along with it:

How did F.D.R. manage to make big government so clean?

A large part of the answer is that oversight was built into New Deal programs from the beginning. The Works Progress Administration, in particular, had a powerful, independent “division of progress investigation” devoted to investigating complaints of fraud. This division was so diligent that in 1940, when a Congressional subcommittee investigated the W.P.A., it couldn’t find a single serious irregularity that the division had missed.

But herein lies the problem: Krugman assumes that the absence of any evidence of corruption means anything in today’s political climate. Sadly enough, it doesn’t.

Let us recall, if we may, the last time the nation went through a transition between presidential administrations. We were told in all seriousness that the outgoing Clinton administration had physically trashed and looted the West Wing:

Leading the cry against the trashing of the White House was the Fox News Channel. Virtually every major Fox personality reported it as fact, often expressing their own personal outrage. Guests on the channel chimed in, condemning the Clintons and their staffers.

Trouble is, it never happened. Not at all. According to who? The government itself, in the form of the General Services Administration:

Responding to a request from Rep. Bob Barr, a Georgia Republican, who asked for an investigation, the GSA found that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

“The condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy,” according to a GSA statement.

But it didn’t matter, you see, because the story was already out there and had already been widely reported; it became part of the conventional wisdom that the Clintonistas had trashed the place and the Bushies rose above it like gentlemen. This fit with the press narrative of the time, which was the facile contention that the “grown-ups” were back in charge. Given a choice between a story that fits the dominant narrative and a story that fits the facts, the Washington press corps has shown time and time again that they’ll always go for the former.

This is the more serious problem the Obama administration faces, for even if they manage to run a completely squeaky-clean administration they’ll still be running up against the dominant narrative, which is that government is filled with waste, corruption and fraud and that public assistance programs are only good for giving out large bundles of cash to the lazy and undeserving.

Until we have a press corps that behaves a little less like extras in a scene from Heathers, this will be an issue, and unless Obama plays to their collective ego as skillfully as Bush did, it’ll be a tough slog.

One of the biggest challenges we face as a nation is making facts matter again. I’m optimistic about a lot of things, but I’m afraid hoping for this might be pushing it a tad.