Lefty economists unsuccessfully try to stretch outside their comfort zones.

One of the first questions posed was an intricate query about the bailout, to which Goolsbee responded that it was an in-the-weeds question—but in the weeds was where he liked to be. It provided cover as he talked about the micro-details and didn't bother to explain the macro-picture. All of Goolsbee's theatrics disguised his rote recitation of Obama's economic rhetoric. The rhetoric is starting to sound empty, too.

Goolsbee, of course, is the author of the ultimate politics-endangering-policy anecdote. It came during the primary season, when word leaked that Goolsbee had told Canadian officials not to believe Obama's tough talk on walking away from NAFTA. Obama's campaign claimed Goolsbee was misquoted. As a Big Money colleague mentioned after the debate, it's not hard to imagine how a comment like that could have slipped out of Goolsbee's mouth. When NAFTA came up during the debate, it was the one time Holtz-Eakin really overpowered Goolsbee.

Some of Goolsbee's Obama-loving colleagues spoke earlier in the day, a block north of the debate hall. There, a troika of economists—two liberal, one agnostic—had a powwow with CNN's John Roberts. The lineup: Jeffrey "Bono Wrote My Foreword" Sachs, George "$9 Billion Net Worth" Soros, and Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini. (Video of the panel can be found here.)

This was Jeffrey Sachs' show, as most things are with Sachs. He persuaded Soros and Roubini to join him at Columbia to figure out whether we can save the world economy. Sachs' answer to the question was clear: Yes, but only if we elect Barack Obama.

When Sachs speaks about the underpinnings of global economics, it's clear why he's a media darling. He speaks in a lucid, logical progression of thoughts. At the panel, he deftly detailed how this crisis is worse than the bursting of the tech bubble at the end of the '90s (people became poor then; people and banks became poor this time), why economists are trained incorrectly (they place too much faith in surface-level indicators that don't necessarily correlate to the health of the underlying economy), and how Alan Greenspan got us into this mess (by listening to Ayn Rand and leaving interest rates far too low for far too long). They were accessible explanations of policy, and he had some in the audience nodding and audibly hmmph-ing in approval.

But then he started talking about politics and tainted his economic outlook. He eased into it, saying that we needed a globally negotiated macroeconomic policy. That would take diplomacy, something Barack Obama proudly supports. Fair enough. But then Sachs shifted into a higher gear. "We haven't had a government in about three years that functions, we don't have a presidency that functions," Sachs railed. It was jarring because of how generalized a statement it was compared with the precise economic explanations Sachs had offered just moments earlier.