Jon Margolis, former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

Some weeks ago, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered ran a report about Marco Rubio, the young Florida conservative who is challenging his party’s establishment—and its governor—by running for the GOP nomination for an open U.S. Senate seat against Gov. Charlie Crist.

It was a lively report, one which conveyed both Rubio’s political strengths and his possible weaknesses. It also illustrated his public policy outlook by finding a portion of his speech that seemed to sum up what distinguishes him from his opponents.

"If you choose to have a society where government provides you with more, then you must have more government," Rubio said, speaking of Western European countries with universal health insurance, more child care, and longer vacations. "And you must have more government involvement in your economy. And the more that government is involved in your economy, the less economy there is left over for the rest of us."

In Rubio’s opinion, NPR correspondent Robert Siegel explained, those policies produce “less innovation, fewer small-business start-ups — a country not cut out for entrepreneurs, the go-getters.”

Because it lacks all those social insurance schemes, Rubio said, “the United States of America can best be described as the greatest single collection of go-getters in world history.”

In world history? Wow! That’s pretty impressive.

Is it true?

That depends on who answers the question. According to a new book by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle (Grand Central Publishing), Israel has, at least as Publisher’s Weekly summarized the thesis, “the highest number of start ups per capita of any nation in the world.”  (Link to Start up Nation...)

Interesting place, Israel. It has a thriving free enterprise economy. But it also has a thriving welfare state, a residue of its quasi-socialist origins. It actually has most of those government guarantees that Rubio thinks sap initiative.

In an interview with the New York Times “Freakonomics” blog, co-author Senor attributed Israeli initiative to the country’s famed “chutzpah” (effrontery to the nth degree) and to its universal (except for Arabs) military service, which provides both “hands-on exposure to next-gen technology, (and) training in teamwork, mission orientation, leadership, and a desire to continue serving their country by contributing to its tech sector — a source of pride for just about every Israeli.”   ( "How Did Israel Become Start Up Nation")

In other words, government schooling and what might well be called compulsory, collective, indoctrination seem to have something to do with Israel’s economic success. That doesn’t exactly support Rubio’s libertarian thesis.
 

On the other hand, according to the Global Enterprise Monitor of the Danish National Executive Report, the U.S. ranks third, behind only Brazil and South Korea, when it comes to the percentage of “total entrepreneurial activity among the ‘Alpha Group.’”
(The Danish Eexecutive Report)

Whatever the Alpha Group may be.

But while almost one of every ten Americans reported starting (or planning to start) a business in 2000, a few years later fewer than five percent of those businesses had survived.

Making entrepreneurship a ticket to penury?

Maybe. Economists do say people often start their own business because they can’t find a good job.

Besides, on the other other hand, there are studies showing that economic opportunity is greater in other countries. According to two economists from the Brookings Institution,  “recent research shows that in the Nordic countries and in the United Kingdom, children born into a lower-income family have a greater chance than those in the United States of forming a substantially higher-income family by the time they're adults. (Brookings Institute Report)

Enough. One could go back and forth and forth and back again trying to confirm or refute Rubio’s (somewhat amorphous, when you think about it) claim of America’s disproportionate go-getterism. From the journalist’s perspective, though, the key question is not whether Rubio’s assertion is right or wrong. It’s why on earth Siegel didn’t challenge the assertion.
It isn’t that Siegel was a patsy for the candidate. Noting that in discussing abortion Rubio mentioned “the privacy clause of the constitution,”  Siegel bluntly—and correctly—pointed out, “there isn’t any.”

But in dealing with what he and NPR apparently judged to be the key element of Rubio’s political outlook, Siegel didn’t bother to ask politely, “can you back up that contention with some statistics?” Or at least, “can you refer me to an economist or sociologist who will provide some supporting evidence.?”

(For the record I left both an email and a phone message with Rubio’s press operation asking both of the above questions. The messages were not returned).

Bizarre. Reporters should check it out when their mothers say they love them. But a candidate can make a sweeping statement about the world economy, and not be challenged.
The objective here is not to criticize Siegel, who was going about his job the way most political reporters do these days. It isn’t even to criticize the way most political reporters go about their job. It’s just to describe it.

They go about on the assumption that their job is to describe and explain a process. The process could be running for office, voting for a bill in Congress, guiding the bill through committee, raising money, planning an ad buy, interpreting the latest polls, or dealing with lobbyists. Whatever the process is, it is all that matters.

Perhaps it should be. Process is important. But so is informing the public about matters of substance, and last month an interesting new poll raised questions about whether journalists were doing that. (Vanity Fair Poll)

Among the questions asked in the survey taken by Vanity Fair magazine and CBS News’s 60 Minutes program was, “Could you confidently explain what exactly the public option (in the health care bills) is to someone who didn’t know?”
Only 28 percent said they could while 66 percent said they could not.

OK, taken as a whole, the survey was somewhat whimsical. One of the questions asked was which singer respondents would “least want to hear at a painfully high volume.” And the public as a whole has never been a collection of policy analysts.

But there’s a suspicion that more people could explain the public option to others if more news stories had tried to explain it to begin with. Instead, almost all the coverage is about the process—can the Democrats get 60 votes? What does Joe Lieberman really want? Is Olympia Snowe in play? Who’s working on compromise language?

Important matters all, which should be reported. Still, every once in a while the reporters covering the story could take a day to describe the contents of the subject of all this process. Granted, that’s not always easy. But this is America. Aren’t any of our reporters go-getters?