Lefty economists unsuccessfully try to stretch outside their comfort zones.

To economic-celebrity stalkers, Columbia University was its own Thirty-Block Zone on Monday. Due to a serendipitous scheduling quirk, the school played host to an all-star lineup of some of the most important economists in America. Everybody got together to do all any self-respecting economist can do these days—talk about how screwed we are. Two panels, three hours, five economists. Non. Stop. Action.

The two panels had drastically different focuses—one global, one domestic. Yet both illustrated a stark new reality as the country moves beyond the bailout. The emergency-intervention drills are over, and now politics and policy matter most. Yet, as became clear on Monday, smart policy can poison effective politics and vice versa. Economists are eternally stuck in between those two worlds.

First, the marquee event: a debate between Obama's and McCain's two chief economic advisers, Austan Goolsbee—who has written for Slate—and Douglas Holtz-Eakin. (Find video of the debate here.) The two men stood behind tall lecterns and were courteously questioned by a panel of Columbia economists. Both strayed far from their candidates' caricatured personas. Goolsbee was dynamic and intense all night, at times appearing overly aggressive toward Holtz-Eakin, who wore a serene deadpan for most of the debate. Holtz-Eakin seemed to realize there was no reason to get excited about a debate in front of a few hundred liberal college students—better not to make a gaffe than to break any new ground.

But that didn't help his performance. Goolsbee mopped the floor with Holtz-Eakin throughout the debate. He was on message throughout, bringing up the middle class over and over again and echoing Obama's most familiar attacks on McCain's economic policy. (The credit crisis "is the very culmination of the disturbing eight-year trend that we have seen under the Bush administration.") He successfully neutered Holtz-Eakin's responses before they had time to set in. ("Do not fall prey to the trick you just heard from Doug" and "You clearly didn't get an answer to that [question] because you never get an answer [from Doug].") When earmarks inevitably made their way into the discussion, Goolsbee shoved Palin's "bridge to nowhere" escapades in Holtz-Eakin's face and cried stomach-churning hypocrisy. "This part of the debate is brought to you by Mylanta," Goolsbee smirked.

Poor Holtz-Eakin, meanwhile, was forced to defend a schizophrenic economic policy that objective economists have derided for being curiously comprised. He once again rode McCain's bloodied mortgage plan into battle, only to get skewered. When asked if McCain could balance the budget in four years, Holtz-Eakin said the "events of the past few weeks have thrown a wrench into that." This directly conflicts with McCain's statement at last week's debate. To be fair, though, Holtz-Eakin has long espoused economic realities even if McCain has ignored them.

Goolsbee won the debate mainly because of how he shoved around McCain's half-baked policies, not because of his own policy prowess. He never elevated above the politics of our economic moment to discuss what an Obama administration would mean for the country. Goolsbee, who comes from academia, seems to have lost his academic self to politics.