I may be a card-carrying member of the liberal blogging guild, but I'm not a Tom Friedman hater. Seriously, I respect his body of work, going back to his days when he was reporting from Lebanon for the New York Times. I appreciate the breadth of his knowledge, which surely exceeds mine. And I admire his ability to produce columns for as long as he has been doing it. Opinion writing isn’t as easy as it looks.

But Wednesday’s column was one of those that drove even me bonkers. And it’s not because the column as a whole was awful. It actually wove together some disparate ideas into an interesting thesis. The problem was the last paragraph, which repeated one of the most annoying and pernicious tropes in American politics today.

The column took readers around the globe, pointing out how leaders in Europe, the Arab Mideast, China, and the U.S. had each squandered opportunities to strengthen their countries. The Europeans didn’t take advantage of low interest rates to invest in their productivity. The Arabs didn’t take advantage of relative stability to democratize. The Chinese didn’t take advantage of growth to crack down on corruption or undertake political reform. The Americans didn’t take advantage of budget surpluses and a Cold War dividend to restore fiscal balance.

Like I said, it was a perfectly fine column, right up until the end. That’s when he reprised some familiar advice for President Obama:

If I were President Obama, I’d focus my entire campaign now on an effort to reforge a “grand bargain” with Republicans based on a near-term infrastructure stimulus tied with a Simpson-Bowles long-term fiscal rebalancing. At a minimum, it would show that Obama has a sensible plan to fix the economy—which is what people want most from the president—and many in business would surely support it. We cannot wait until January to do serious policy making again. [italics in original]

What’s wrong with advising Obama to promote a balanced approach of stimulus and Simpson-Bowles style deficit reduction? Nothing at all, except that he’s already doing something like it.