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Matthew Continetti figures out we are in the middle of the Bloomberg Presidency.
… Rather than pursue his American Jobs Act with anything approaching vigor, or authorize a no-brainer such as the Keystone XL Pipeline, or try new approaches that might conceivably attract Republican support, Obama chose the social issues, with an eye to changing control of the House in 2014. His current agenda embodies perfectly the concerns and worldview of the wealthy men and women who fund his party. Republicans are not the only ones affected by “donor-ism.” Guns and immigration are perennial favorites of the Bloomberg set—the class of liberal rich that fatuously believes it is somehow “above politics.” This isn’t the beginning of Obama’s second term. It’s the beginning of Bloomberg’s first one.
The Bloomberg style has several distinctive features. The first is a complete indifference to or dismissal of middle class concerns. In this view, it matters less that the middle class is enjoying full employment or economic independence or a modicum of social mobility or even action on issues it finds important, and more that it has access to government benefits generous enough to shut it up.
Recall that in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy Bloomberg was far more interested in seeing the Yuppie-filled New York City Marathon take place, and in linking the storm to apocalyptic climate change, than in mobilizing the combined forces of municipal and state and federal government to take care of the white working class on Staten Island and in the Rockaways. Similarly, Barack Obama has nothing new to say on the economy or deficit, but delivers speech after speech on gun regulations that would not have stopped the Sandy Hook massacre, while his allies in the Senate work to import low-wage labor on the one hand and high-end Silicon Valley labor on the other. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the nation hopes for better days.
Another hallmark of the Bloomberg style is its insufferable condescension. One need only have heard the tiniest whine of a Bloomberg speech to know what I’m talking about. The preening attitude of superiority manifests itself in a form of moral blackmail. Adversaries of the Bloomberg-Obama agenda are not simply mistaken. There is, it is implied, something wrong with them personally.
Opponents of superfluous gun regulations are viewed as accessories after the fact to the latest mass shooting. Opponents of an immigration amnesty are either racist or nativist or cruel. Skeptics of the relevance or efficacy of efforts to halt climate change are “denialists” similar to the cranks who say the Holocaust did not happen. “The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence,” wrote Oscar Wilde. That is a fair description of American political discourse in the age of Bloomberg and Obama, when the rich and liberal exploit pity, shame, and guilt to further their agenda.
What makes the Bloomberg method so insidious is its hold over the media. The vast majority of “content producers” for print and digital and television subscribe to the agenda of rich liberals because they are either part of that class, or wish to be part of it one day, or are directly employed by the companies controlled or likely to be controlled by its members, including the billionaire mayor, who spends much of his time at his $10 million Bermuda mansion.
Kim Strassel devotes a column to the slimy Terry McAuliffe and his run for VA governor.
Turn over any green-energy rock, and wiggling underneath will be the usual creepy mix of political favoritism and taxpayer-funded handouts. Add to this the Clintons, Mississippi and a murky visa program, and you’ve got a particularly ripe political embarrassment for Terry McAuliffe.
Everyone remember The Macker? Best Friend of Bill. Chairman of Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign. Famed money-tree shaker. Former Democratic Party chief. Failed 2009 contender for the Virginia governorship but now back as the party’s nominee for that position in this fall’s election. Oh—and in Mr. McAuliffe’s words—”a Virginia businessman” intent on “creating jobs.”
Or at least that was the image Mr. McAuliffe sought to portray in 2009, when he became chairman of a car company called GreenTech Automotive, with plans to produce golf-cart sized electric vehicles. The former DNC chief is no stranger to moneymaking, having once used a friendly union pension fund to spin a $100 investment in a Florida land deal into $2.45 million. GreenTech, however, was designed to shed the moneyman image and to reposition Mr. McAuliffe as a (clean) job creator the way Mark Warner and Bob McDonnell used their pro-business credentials to win office in Virginia.
To this end, Mr. McAuliffe got out the political Rolodex and went on the money hunt. …
More from the editors at the Examiner.
How did Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic Party’s choice to run for governor in Virginia in 2013, get so rich? His first job out of college was with President Carter’s 1980 re-election campaign where he rose to be national finance director at the age of 22. Then, after graduating from law school, McAuliffe helped found the Federal City National Bank in 1985. Three short years later, the bank’s board elected McAuliffe chairman, making him the youngest elected chairman of a federally chartered bank in the history of the United States.
Now why would a tiny young bank elect a campaign-worker-turned-law student with no banking experience president of the operation? Maybe it was because McAuliffe immediately roped in big business from politicians like then-presidential candidate Richard Gephardt, then-House Majority Whip Tony Coelho and then-Speaker of the House Jim Wright.
By 1992, McAuliffe was inducing Democratic-friendly union pension funds into investing millions of union member dollars in his Florida real estate company. Not all those loans got repaid, however. After McAuliffe’s real estate company failed to pay one $6 million loan from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Department of Labor sued. It claimed the pension trustees improperly invested with McAuliffe since they should have known the loan would never be repaid. In 2001, those trustees were forced to pay the union $4.95 million in restitution. McAuliffe got off scot-free. …
The Atlantic has an interesting piece on the job search problems of the “long-term unemployed.” The article needs better focus and a good editor, but the methodology of the research is good and the results are discouraging.
… But just how bad is it for the long-term unemployed? Ghayad ran a follow-up field experiment to find out. In a new working paper, he sent out 4800 fictitious resumes to 600 job openings, with 3600 of them for fake unemployed people. Among those 3600, he varied how long they’d been out of work, how often they’d switched jobs, and whether they had any industry experience. Everything else was kept constant. The mocked-up resumes were all male, all had randomly-selected (and racially ambiguous) names, and all had similar education backgrounds. The question was which of them would get callbacks.
It turns out long-term unemployment is much scarier than you could possibly imagine.
The results are equal parts unsurprising and terrifying. Employers prefer applicants who haven’t been out of work for very long, applicants who have industry experience, and applicants who haven’t moved between jobs that much. But how long you’ve been out of work trumps those other factors. As you can see in the chart below from Ghayad’s paper, people with relevant experience (red) who had been out of work for six months or longer got called back less than people without relevant experience (blue) who’d been out of work shorter.
Look at that again. As long as you’ve been out of work for less than six months, you can get called back even if you don’t have experience. But after you’ve been out of work for six months, it doesn’t matter what experience you have. Quite literally. …
Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.