Ezra Klein, coauthor of Abundance, is out with a new column encouraging Senate Democrats to pursue a fight that might provoke a government shutdown — or maybe he doesn’t think it’s a good idea. On today’s edition of The Editors, Rich and Co. aren’t quite sure which conclusion Klein is coming to.
Jim says, “It really felt like he started out the column with one idea of ‘I’m going to argue in favor of the Senate Democrats forcing a government shutdown.’ And by the end of the column, he’s talked himself out of it and he never went back to change the beginning of it.”
“I don’t want to play armchair psychologist,” says Noah, “but he makes it hard when he writes and publishes a column that is this incomprehensible, this illogical, this contradictory in its own text that you can only retreat into analyzing the motivations that led to it.”
Charlie believes “Ezra Klein is a fraud and this is posturing and positioning. . . . The job that we have is to say what you think. That is the only thing that one needs to do in this job, other than be able to express oneself and have elementary knowledge. The sine qua non of this job is to say directly and forthrightly what you think, even if people shout at you, even if people on your own side stop inviting you to things, and he can’t do it.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.