Last week, the New York Times rolled out a petty and somewhat meanspirited editiorial against Chris Christie and the rest of the Republican field. The gist of it is that, by running for president, Christie isn’t spending as much time at home working for New Jersey as he ought to:
If the NYT thinks this is a good question to ask, why didn’t they ask it in 2008 when a sitting New York senator who at times missed nearly 80 percent of her votes? Or the junior senator from Illinois, which the paper had no shortange of praise for, who at times missed more than 80 percent of his votes?
What about the current mayor of New York? In May, the Times reported de Blasio was getting critized for being missing in action:
By the time Mr. de Blasio returns, he will have been traveling outside New York on political trips for at least a portion of 10 of the last 31 days. (Throw in a vacation to Puerto Rico and college visits with his son, and the mayor has spent about a third of April and May on the road.)
Mr. de Blasio hasn’t slowed down much since then. He’s been traveling around the country promoting some amorphous progressive policy agenda and decrying inequality, the direct relevance of which is pretty questionable considering the day to day needs of New Yorkers. And yet, he’s not even running for office. I don’t recall the Times editorial page getting into a snit about this absenteeism.
On another level, what this amounts to is that the Times editorial page is picking up on Jeb Bush’s calculated criticism of Rubio that he leveled at him during last week’s debate. While it’s not an entirely invalid criticism, it’s not particularly damning or unprecedented, and there’s little evidence showing it’s something voters care about. If we’re going to talk about Young Men in a Hurry missing votes, it’s worth noting JFK missed nearly a third of his votes when he was still in the House of Representatives, and most of votes in from January to July in 1952 when he was running for senate. Despite attacks on his absenteeism from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and the Boston Herald, it did not seem to impede his political career one bit.
Picking up on such a shallow attack on Rubio from another Republican candidate and spreading it around thoughtlessly only suggests that the Times editorial page is more interested in political michief-making. Because it’s impossible to argue they’re fairly applying the principles the paper claims to stand for.
