Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane has long argued that it’s hard to be informed about politics and economics without reading the Washington Post and New York Times. Crane’s viewpoint may strike some as odd given the slant of both newspapers mentioned, but it’s really not. He reminds skeptics that both publications employ extraordinarily talented people, and while they may not share his libertarianism, they report crucial information. All that, plus Crane’s view is that reading the Post and Times is the equivalent of being allowed into “the other team’s huddle.”
Evan Osnos is a former reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and since 2008 he’s been a staff writer for The New Yorker. Osnos is one of those extraordinarily talented reporters, his writing style is of the kind that other writers would logically aspire to, and while his politics don’t lean Republican or libertarian, he’s arguably what Crane has in mind. His columns and stories are always very interesting, and educational. His 2014 book on China, Age of Ambition, was unputdownable. It was a much better read of the country than can presently be found on an increasingly protectionist right wing, plus it was free of so much of the nonsensical fallacy coming from both sides about China as an “export-based economy”; the latter an explicit and mindless rejection of Say’s Law.
Osnos’s latest book that will be reviewed here is Joe Biden: The Life, The Run, and What Matters Now. The review will start with interesting anecdotes, and some will be analyzed. It will also aim to analyze what the author thought in reporting on Biden. It’s said that reporters report the facts, but we all have our filters. Osnos isn’t immune to this truth about human nature, and there’s no expressed presumption that he thinks he is. Still, if the book had a weakness, or better yet if it at times lacked something this reader wanted, it had to do with Osnos reporting on something Biden did or said without offering his own thoughts. As an example, Osnos referenced a Biden interview with his New Yorker colleagues Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson in which he told them he’d acted in “fairness to [Clarence] Thomas, which he in retrospect didn’t deserve.” OK, but why? Over 90% of the time Supreme Court justices agree with each other on the way to unanimous votes. Had something come out about Thomas since the hearings that caused Biden to change his point of view? Or was it just politics? I wanted to know what Osnos thought.
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