Paul Krugman, economist and Op-ed columnist of New York Times wrote in his article under the title, “G.O.P. Candidates and Obama’s failure to fail" – August 10.
The shared premise of everyone on the Republican side is that the
Obama years have been a time of policy disaster on every front. Yet
the candidates on that stage had almost nothing to say about any of
the supposed disaster areas. And there was a good reason they seemed
so tongue-tied: Out there in the real world, none of the disasters
their party predicted have actually come to pass. President Obama just
keeps failing to fail.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/opinion/paul-krugman-gop-candidates-and-obamas-failure-to-fail.
What does “fail (failure) to fail” mean? Does it mean President Obama keeps failing as it has been predicted, or it should have been?
Is “fail to fail” a popular turn of phrase?
What’s wrong with simply saying “President Obama just keeps failing (to deliver his promises)”?
Best Answer
The context here is political and (especially) economic theories that (according to Paul Krugman) many conservative politicians and economists subscribe to and that yield scientific (or quasi-scientific) predictions about what will ensue if certain economic policies are pursued under certain conditions. According to Krugman, anti-Keynesian economists (and their political supporters) warned of failure on various fronts as a logical outcome of the policies that President Obama announced and pursued from the early stages of his presidency.
Because a patina of scientificness is associated with economists' predictions (some economists express their theories as immutable laws, back their theories up with data-heavy explanations, and often use complicated algorithms to model real-world outcomes), it's embarrassing for the promoter of a particular economic model when the outcomes it predicts don't materialize.
Krugman asserts that various conservative economists have long predicted that a number of Obama's policies would fail miserably; under the circumstances, it would clearly be a problem for those theories if, in the real world, the criticized policies "failed to fail."