Jonathan Chait does insults better than almost anyone; in his recent note on Larry Kudlow, he declares that

The interesting thing about Kudlow’s continuing influence over conservative thought is that he has elevated flamboyant wrongness to a kind of performance art.

And Chait doesn’t even mention LK’s greatest hits — his sneers at “bubbleheads” who thought something was amiss with housing prices, his warnings about runaway inflation in 2009-10, his declaration that a high stock market is a vote of confidence for the president — but only, apparently, if said president is Republican.

But what’s really interesting about Kudlow is the way his influence illustrates the failure of the Chicago School, as compared with the triumph of MIT.

But, you say, Kudlow isn’t a product of Chicago, or indeed of any economics PhD program. Indeed — and that’s the point.

There are plenty of conservative economists with great professional credentials, up to and including Nobel prizes. But the right isn’t interested in their input. They get rolled out on occasion, mainly as mascots. But the economists with a real following, the economists who have some role in determining who gets the presidential nomination, are people like Kudlow, Stephen Moore, and Art Laffer.

Meanwhile, on the liberal side of the aisle it’s all Clark medalists, laureates, and/or economists who may not (yet) have those particular gongs but have large research CVs and lots of citations in the professional literature.

And yes, what those of us in that role say in policy debates is very much informed by the professional research. In my own case, I’d guess that about 80 percent of what I’ve had to say about macroeconomics since the crisis was prefigured in my 1998 liquidity trap paper, which was classic MIT style — a stylized little model backed by and applied to real-world events, with lots of data used simply. (Seriously, skim that piece and you’ll see why I sometimes seem so frustrated: People keep rolling out arguments I showed were wrong all those years ago, or trotting out arguments I made back then as something new and somehow a challenge to conventional wisdom.)

Maybe the right prefers guys without credentials because they really know how things work, although I’d argue that this proposition can be refuted with two words: Larry Kudlow. More likely, it’s that affinity fraud thing: Professors, even if they’re conservative, just aren’t the base’s kind of people. I don’t think it’s an accident that Kudlow still dresses like Gordon Gekko after all these years.

Anyway, food for thought — if thinking is the kind of thing you like to do.