It would seem that the conversation at Politico went something like this: "Hey, we need to hit the Obama administration for the havoc its policies have wreaked on the middle class. But we can't go after them too hard, because that might burn some bridges, and we'll lose our stenographer — er, journalistic — access. So we need to use someone sympathetic to Democrats who will know how not to go over the line."
They chose contributing editor Zachary Karabell, who during most of his writeup did a presentable job of being not too critical while posing as an objective observer — that is, until his final four paragraphs.
An early clue that something was amiss came in the following paragraph containing Karabell's take on falling real incomes since 2009, the year the recession officially ended:
Wages are not and should not be the sole determinant of whether people are doing well. After all, if costs are dropping, then even stagnant wages increase purchasing power. And now, costs of energy are dropping, which will translate into an implicit boost to income, even though it won’t show up in wage and income data.
That's not true, Zach. If prices fall and current-dollar wages stay the same, reported real wages will increase. It will show up in the data, because real wages are expressed in terms of "purchasing power." And while we're at it, saying that wages aren't "the sole determinant of whether people are doing well" is pretty weak. For people without much in the way of investments, i.e., a very large minority if not a majority of Americans, it's analogous to saying that the final score isn't the sole determinant of which team won a sports contest.
The column's final four paragraphs began with Karabell discussing the book and movie "Primary Colors." The film was a financial and box office disaster, and only liberal wonks in the Northeast ever really cared about either item. Karabell's reference gave away the game a bit, but he proceeded to completely unmask himself after that (bolds are mine):
In many respects what was lacking these past years was a visible and immediate and large safety net combined with a more forceful discussion the great transition we are in. There is a scene from the novel and the book Primary Colors where Stanton, the pseudo-President Clinton, running for office, address a factory that is about to be shut down. He says bluntly that those jobs aren’t coming back and there is nothing he or anyone elected official can do and anyone who says otherwise is lying. It is up to each of us to find ways forward, he says. But politicians can fight for people and with people and work to provide breathing and bridges to that clichéd future.
Yes, it’s fiction, but it touched chords not radically different than Franklin Roosevelt calling out fear as the first and perhaps most dangerous element in any economic crisis. And FDR understood that staunching that fear was primary, and that if it wasn’t, everything else would fail. The resulting New Deal had only mixed success, but that part was perfect.
That is the part that we didn’t get perfect that past six years, and that no amount of sudden attention will quickly dissipate. Today’s economic recovery doesn’t look like the familiar patterns of the 20th century, and that’s because we face different realities, of deflation not inflation, of waves of self-employed rather than a lifetime at a “company,” of a world with an emerging middle class that is multiple times bigger than the United States.
President Obama was right when he said Tuesday that middle-class economics is key to our health. But we have barely started and we are very late.
The "we" references in the final two paragraphs are clearly not to "we as a nation." They are at least to "we as Democrats/liberals," and arguably to "we who are in or are fans of the Obama administration."
Karabell's LinkedIn page identifies his primary occupation as "Head of Global Strategy at Envestnet." His Twitter bio adds that he is "(an) Author, investor, CNBC/MSNBC commentator, consultant on various and sundry, with a passion for sustainability to boot."
At that point, Karabell had checked off too many reflexively leftist boxes for me not to see if he's also a political donor. To almost no one's surprise, he is. Naturally, 100 percent of his money has gone to Democratic Party causes and candidates (Note: The graphic below only includes 2014):
2014 was actually a slow year for Karabellian contributions. The full Open Secrets results show over $35,000 in contributions in 2012, over $20,000 in the the 2007-2008 election cycle, and donations going back to the 2004 John Kerry presidential campaign.
Politico Magazine apparently didn't see the need to tell its readers that the author of its supposedly objective analysis of the Obama administration's middle-class policies has donated over $70,000 to Democratic Party campaigns and causes during the past decade. If readers knew that, they would see Karabell's criticisms, which are in essence that the government which Obama and his party have brought to the brink of bankruptcy should have spent even more money that they didn't have, in a proper light.
The need for disclosure seems not to even have occurred to the editors at Politico Mag. Their next internal conversation should be, but probably won't be, about why fewer people take their output seriously. Maybe a contributing editor who gives larges sums to one political party, but whose donor status isn't disclosed, just might be part of the explanation.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
