But it’s not in the spirit of giving counsel. I’m not saying you do it—
No, I take that point. I don’t see myself in those conversations as a counsellor.
Because, you know, there is a tradition of this—Walter Lippmann giving counsel to this one or that one.
And doing secret diplomatic missions. The lines were blurry back then.
So you keep it pretty on the up and up.
I try to.
Would you ever go into politics?
No.
Absolutely not? You’re making a Sherman statement.
I’m making a Sherman statement. I think you have to know what you’re good at doing. I think I’m good at doing this.
What is your sense of your mission as a podcaster, as a writer?
My sense of mission is simple: I have values and beliefs about how the world should work and what would make the world better, and I try to persuade people of them, but I also try to explore them in an honest way. I do this because I care about where things are going. I’m not dispassionately observing from the sidelines. I am emotionally, intellectually, spiritually involved.
But what I’m doing, and the way I’m doing it, has changed a lot over the years. In ways that I can follow more through intuition than through some framework. The version of me that was writing “Wonkblog,” and telling everybody about health care and aging in one chart, is not what I’m doing on my podcast now. My podcast is a forum in which I’m not primarily trying to be persuasive. Over time I think it has persuasive elements, but it’s mostly other people talking. I have a lot of people on the show whom I disagree with. And I think it acts as a space in which certain kinds of conversations can be had and then can be put into conversation with each other. And that matters.
In my column, I’m more prescriptive. What goes into, eventually, the book “Abundance,” comes more from the column, and that’s me trying to understand the world and trying to find ways to confront things in it that I find puzzling or unnerving. I try to take seriously questions that I don’t love. I don’t try to insist the world works the way I want it to work. I try to be honest with myself about the way it is working.
You are an important figure at what I think is still, today, the most important news-gathering organization on earth, the New York Times, but it’s also one that everybody has opinions about. And recently Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote a book about the summer of 2020, which was dramatic in a lot of quarters, including the Times. James Bennett fired. Bari Weiss left and created The Free Press. What’s your opinion about Bari Weiss’s increasing influence? It looks like she’s about to be a very important figure at CBS News.
Yeah, it seems like she’s about to take over CBS.
What do you think?
My thing about Bari—and I’ve been on her show—I have a lot of admiration for how good she is at what she does. My disagreements with Bari are that I think she’s asymmetric in sympathy and generosity.
Tell me what that means.
I’ve thought The Free Press’ work on, say, starvation in Gaza has been really bad.
Spell it out.
It’s done this whole thing, like, Well, a lot of the kids who have died and have been reported on, well, they had secondary conditions. And, yes, when you starve a population the people who die first will be the most vulnerable. But that’s not exculpatory. There was overwhelming evidence of how bad things were in Gaza. I felt that they were trying to whitewash it.
I think Bari, though, is an insane talent spotter. If you look at what she’s built at The Free Press, she’s very, very good at finding people, at pulling them in, at networking with them. She’s sort of an impresario. Bringing in Tyler Cowen to be a columnist was a very good idea for them.
The economist.
I’m somebody who’s edited a site, Vox, right? I know how hard this is to do. And Bari has an incredibly sensitive feel for the political moment. It is not my feel for the moment, and her politics are not mine.
What are her politics? How would you describe them?
What I see her trying to do is something that used to be somewhat more common, which is to self-consciously be what she would define as the center. And I see The Free Press tacking back and forth around that. It was much more sort of pro-Trump, I would say, when he was running and the Democrats were in power. But now that he’s in it’s, like, Oh, no, they’re the vandals. The publication is a little bit, to me, like the old New Republic, doing things they used to do. . . . Actually, it’s funny. When I was a blogger, this was something we all used to complain about all the time. All of these organizations that we felt were using this concept, this amorphous concept of the center as a positioning device—
That it was a dodge.
No, it wasn’t a dodge—it was navigational. They weren’t dodging. They were just kind of . . . there were a lot of politicians and a lot of players who had felt like their politics were hewing to some idea of the center, as opposed to a very consistent set of views and principles. And, as media has become polarized, many fewer places are doing that. I think Bari saw a market opportunity in that. Is her center what I think is the center? No. But I recognize a lot of editorial skill there.
Ezra Klein at the DNC on August 20th, 2024. Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine
It was Tuesday afternoon at the United Center in Chicago, a few hours before back-to-back Obamas issued their impassioned calls-to-arms, and the famously sensible explanatory journalist Ezra Klein, who characteristically keeps his passions in check, didn’t have the right credentials to get into the arena. The Secret Service didn’t recognize the New York Times’ star Opinion writer and podcaster, who has had a bit of a glow-up lately with a salt-and-pepper beard and David Beckham–esque haircut, but eventually after we met up was able to figure out how to get in to where he belonged. This is, after all, as much his convention as any journalist this time around, since its high-energy optimism turned on the fact that President Joe Biden no longer was leading the ticket. And, starting early this year, Klein platformed that Establishment desire, leading the coup-drumbeat.
It worked so well that Klein, 40, who has been an influential journalist for over half his life, is ready to come out from behind his computer, step out of his podcast studio, and into the spotlight. He tells me this is actually the first convention he’s attended since the Obama years. After spending his 20s writing lengthy blog posts on economics, he’s now become a tattooed middle-aged Brooklyn dad in Bonobos and sand-colored Air Force Ones who goes to Burning Man, where he’s headed next week.
“The thing I got right this year wasn’t that Joe Biden was too old to run for reelection. Everyone knew that,” he told me in the back of a bar near his hotel in Downtown Chicago the night before. “The thing I got right this year was that the Democratic Party was an institution that still had decision-making capacity.” In February, Klein launched a series of podcasts and columns arguing that Biden should step aside. He also advocated for alternatives, like an open convention, and made the case for why Kamala Harris was underrated. Following his “prediction about the campaign” in February, as he later referred to it, Klein continued to take the pulse of the party. And while he didn’t get the open convention he was looking for, he did get what he called a “disorganized” mini primary in the veepstakes — and played a role in the unofficial auditioning process, too, having Gretchen Whitmer and then Tim Walz on his show in the days leading up to Harris’s eventual pick. (He also invited Josh Shapiro on, but the Pennsylvania governor turned him down. “And look what happened,” Klein says, seemingly joking.) He says he’s “very uncomfortable” with the amount of attention he’s received, though seems to be enjoying it just fine, even if Semafor was picking on him a bit for being too cozy with top-echelon Dems with a piece posted August 19 they titled “The New York Times’ Ezra Klein Problem.”
There is a historical tension between the newsroom and Opinion side at the Times, one that Klein doesn’t think is all that useful. “I think of my work as primarily reported,” he says. “My line for a very long time back when I was at the Washington Post,” he said, “was that the division between the news and opinion sides made it too hard for the news side to tell the truth and too easy for the opinion side to bullshit.” He adds: “I don’t really think my show’s lineage, so to speak, is actually inside that opinion-news divide.”
Still, the Times works hard to maintain its journalistic propriety. Following the debate, but prior to Biden dropping out, Klein wanted to have Times politics reporter and The Run-Up host Astead Herndon on his show to talk about Harris. But executive editor Joe Kahn shut it down. This was around the time the paper’s own editorial board had joined the chorus of calls for Biden to step aside, a moment when newsroom leaders felt the need to reinforce the division between the newsroom and Opinion side. “Newsroom people get resentful as he veers more into newsmaking,” one Times staffer noted. Said another: “I think he only becomes more powerful over time, since I’d argue the influence of the Times editorial board (and all ed boards, really) has waned over the course of the rise of the internet and social.”
But in general, Klein’s star status doesn’t seem to be a problem at all for the Gray Lady, which runs full-page advertisements for The Ezra Klein Show in the paper and is building out a video dimension to the podcast. He recently interviewed Nancy Pelosi in a room in the middle of Times HQ, footage of which prompted speculation — among media folk, Brooklyn mom group chats, etc. — about that glow-up. He dismisses speculation that he now has a stylist — he’s a man who respects the experts, after all — though notes that he’s been determined to spend “some time this year upgrading my wardrobe and my style, but it’s a thing that has not happened in my mind yet.”
Klein was not the first pundit to urge the president against running for reelection. Maureen Dowd said as much in the summer of 2022 (as did Mark Leibovich); Paul Krugman, too, in September 2023. But what made Klein more influential is “he is seen by many party elites as much more of a partisan figure, instead of just a columnist,” Axios political correspondent Alex Thompson told me. “It was someone pretty deeply steeped in the Democratic Party basically being the first one to break the taboo.” That The Ezra Klein Show is dominating the charts or has a cult following is not new; but the sense that he is plugged into the inner workings of the Democratic Party has imbued the podcast with greater importance.
“I mean, some things happened in public. It wasn’t all just behind-the-scenes reporting,” Klein says, between sips of a mezcal-soda at the hotel bar. “but I try to pay attention to who people pay attention to, and who’s earned that respect and credibility inside the caucus — or inside or among other donors, or among strategists. And you can feel those things.”
Every election cycle at the Times has a face, and Klein, despite being an Opinion writer, is this year’s. “I don’t think anyone notable’s behavior would change because of his podcast,” a Democratic strategist told me. But where he deserves credit, they said, is “helping to initiate that conversation a while ago” and keeping it in the media long after.
“This was not a fun process,” Klein says. “This was a really wrenching thing the party had to go through.” As for his role in it, heavy is the head. “Look, I recognize that in the rare moments when you want to say you’re right about something, you should agree and accept it, but it also feels like it always pins a target on your back,” he said. Klein seems broken up, though unsurprised, about the bridges he’s burnt. “When I did the February piece, I recognized it was going to fuck up a lot of my relationships in the Biden White House.” Still, he was “aghast” when I told him I’d heard that there was conspiratorial chatter among Biden officials after Klein’s piece, wondering who — someone in Obama’s camp? — had planted the idea with Klein. “I’m actually shocked to hear anybody would think that. That’s so dumb,” he said. “The only thing happening here was saying what everybody was seeing.”
It was through reporting, he said, that he came to that conclusion. “I talked to people and I understood that they could imagine that Joe Biden shouldn’t run, but they couldn’t imagine what would lead him to step aside and what to do if he did,” he says, noting he was frustrated by the “sense that this was going to be a stable situation — that people were not going to need alternatives.” He also felt he owed it to his listeners. “I don’t think people pay a lot of attention to the mechanics of nominating processes,” he says. “I was just trying to make people aware that this wasn’t done.”
Klein tells me he’s interested to see if this moment of collective action changes the Democratic Party going forward. “Institutions have muscles and the muscles atrophy when they’re not used and they strengthen when they are used, and the Democratic party did something collectively. It’s really unusual, functionally unknown about American politics.” The party proved itself “beyond the ambitions of any one person,” he says. “It’s not that I think the Democratic party is going to start knocking its candidates off or something, but it just learned it can act, in a way that I could tell you for a fact its members did not think they could.”
Talking to Klein can feel, at times, like listening to his show. He’ll casually go on a tangent about child-care policy or recall a cross-national study, and then he’ll become a normal person again, talking about the challenge of juggling his professional and personal life, married to Atlantic journalist Annie Lowrey, with two kids, living in Brooklyn.
“I think I’m an interesting person on my podcast. I often wonder why I’m not more interesting at home,” he said. “Sometimes I think, Does my family get the best version of me? And the answer is often no.” I asked him what he does for fun. “A mix of very quiet and very loud,” he said. “I spend a lot of time quietly reading. I have very deep friendships. I go to a lot of shows.” This will not be his first time going to Burning Man.
He has been covering politics since he was 18, cutting his teeth as a policy blogger. He moved the blog from Typepad to the American Prospect in 2007, when he was 23. Then he went to the Washington Post, where he ran the popular Wonkblog. After five years he left to co-found Vox, the website that became the namesake of the multi-brand digital-media company that today owns New York Magazine, until departing for the Times in 2020. His popular interview podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, followed him there.
He considered going another route: selling his podcast to Spotify, starting a Substack. “I sometimes feel like a dumbass who’s left a ton of money on the table,” he admits. But he likes being part of institutions and seems, in a vaguely messianic way, to see it as his duty to support them. “It’s true that I could make more money doing this independently, but if all the people who do what I do decide to go and capture all of their revenue themselves, then what happens to all the parts of the industry that are frankly more important than what I do, but are not self-sustaining in that way?” he says, citing investigative and foreign reporting among the beats that haven’t quite figured out the newsletter format. It seems to be a mutually beneficial relationship: “The Times is a unique power,” he says. “If I had done the same pieces from Substack, would it have mattered?”
Going to the Times meant he didn’t have to manage anymore — “it feels almost decadent to only really have to worry about my own work,” he says — and could focus on what he wanted to do, as opposed to the biggest stories that Vox needed its biggest voices to cover. “That allows me to follow my own interests with a lot more authenticity than I would be able to bring otherwise,” he says. What some people love about Klein and what some people hate about him is that he makes himself a mini expert on everything, dipping in and out of topics, from AI to wellness to the Russia-Ukraine war. He has a Zadie Smith interview coming up, and will soon welcome back Richard Powers to the show. “Those are things that bring me a huge amount of joy, and it is really hard to imagine what else I could do that would allow me to explore my own interests broadly.”
“He’s an influential voice, but also generationally unique,” said Obama senior adviser Eric Schultz, citing traditional media’s fight for attention and relevance in an ecosystem filled with tweets and clips and trolling. Klein, has “found a sweet spot that I don’t think anyone else has been able to replicate. It’s like what the Sunday shows used to be,” said Schultz. “Now they’re consumed by the blow-by-blow, and Ezra is having the thoughtful conversations.”
Klein, who grew up in Orange County, California, moved from San Francisco to Park Slope, then Gowanus, a year ago to be closer to his wife’s family. The redwoods are still close to his heart, literally, as he has a tattoo of them on his shoulder. He recently added a second tattoo, a typewriter-font “Is that so?” printed on his inner bicep. “A reminder to not believe what you think,” he says, when I ask him what it means to him. “Sometimes people see it and they think of it as outwardly focused, but it’s inwardly focused,” says Klein. “The easiest person to convince of anything is yourself. And it connects to small Zen stories that I like.” It took him a while, he says, to get over the belief that you can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery if you have tattoos, which he claims is “a complete myth” and tells me that I can read all about it in a Timesarticle.
This post-glow up Klein might seem like he’s ready to mingle at the joy-filled late-night celeb-packed party-ready DNC. But he says he’s not really planning on hitting the town (and I didn’t see him out either.) His first night in town was spent at dinner with his editor and a member of congress and then in his hotel room, where he watched the speeches. On Tuesday he watched the speeches from the floor — where, according to his boss, Katie Kingsbury, with whom he was standing, an usher recognized him but not her — but didn’t hit any afters after. “I doubt I’ll go to anything,” he texted me, when I asked him his party plans for the rest of the convention. “Going to watch from the floor each night then I record fairly early in the morning. So no real social calendar really,” he said. “Work, work, work.”
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell wrecked the argument coming from some circles that President Joe Biden should step aside as the Democratic nominee.
How Did Lawrence O’Donnell Debunk The Dump Biden Fantasy?
O’Donnell talked about the dump Biden fantasy and particularly Ezra Klein’s recent piece in The New York Times and said:
I mentioned Joe Biden at a fund-raiser tonight, where he is crushing Donald Trump in the fundraising competition. The latest campaign finance report shows that the Biden-Harris reelection campaign has $56 million on hand at the end of January while the Trump campaign had only $30 million, President Biden is also raising money with and for the Democratic National Committee which has $24 million on hand at the end of January, the Republican National Committee has $8 million. At the end of January. In the month of January alone, the Trump campaign raised eight point eight million, and spend eleven point four million. Donald Trump has spent a total of $50 million on lawyers during the campaign, will spend much more. Other PACs and fundraising committees supporting the Biden-Harris ticket had a combined $117 million at the beginning of this year, and here is the part, right here.
Here’s the part of the story that no one who has said Joe Biden should drop out or has written that Joe Biden should drop out has ever mentioned that every other Democrat whose name shows up in these articles as a substitute for Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee has raised exactly zero or money for a presidential campaign. No one has told you about the money, That means that none of them have thought for a second about the money, every series observer of presidential campaigns is supposed to know how important campaign money is, and not one of these people are telling you that it’s time to get rid of Joe Biden have given a thought to the money, so here is what they haven’t told you or simply do not know, not one penny Gavin Newsom has in his campaign treasury in California is usable in a presidential campaign,
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Money raised for state elections for governors in California and other states are raised under different laws. Then the laws governing federal campaign money. Gavin Newsom has zero to spend on a presidential campaign as of tonight, Gavin Newsom knows that. Gavin Newsom, if he can get the nomination would then leave the convention with no ability to even fly his way home. Let me say the number again, zero. That is how many dollars Gavin Newsome would have to spend, would have to spend on a presidential campaign leaving the Democratic convention, he would have zero.
There is one other candidate, besides Joe Biden, who has raised money for presidential campaign and only that one candidate who’s done that is Kamala Harris, the money raised for the Biden Harris campaign was raised in the name of both candidates, so Kamala Harris has a legal claim on all of that money if Joe Biden were to drop out of that race.
Video:
Joe Biden isn’t going anywhere, because no one else can raise the money or build the massive organization needed to win an election against Donald Trump in the few months before election day, Getting rid of Joe Biden would hand the White House to Donald Trump.
The only other option for Democrats is Vice President Harris, and the same mostly white male progressives who have been trying to get rid of Biden have also been trying to get rid of Harris.
The “Biden Replacement Theory” is absolute BS, and the people pushing it, like Ezra Klein, are smart enough to know better, which makes me think that they know exactly what they are doing, and this is a play for their own relevance more than serious concern about winning in November.
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Awards and Professional Memberships
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Democrats gather in New York in 1924 for the mother of all open conventions. Photo: Apic/Bridgeman via Getty Images
Pundits used to love the idea that somebody might challenge and defeat Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination. However, those hopes seem dead now that primary deadlines have come and gone and the Dean Phillips candidacy went nowhere very fast. The 46th president is going to lock up enough pledged delegates to make him the nominee very soon, and for all the private kvetching about the polls and the incumbent’s age, Democrats are for the most part publicly gearing down for a good, vicious Biden-Trump rematch.
But fantasies of something different happening haven’t totally gone away, and they don’t entirely depend on the remote possibility of Donald Trump being denied the GOP nomination because he’s a convicted felon or a bankrupt loser. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein has suggested Democratic fears about Biden’s age could be addressed by a real unicorn of a development in August: a wide-open Democratic National Convention that would choose a Biden replacement based on who wowed the delegates in Chicago.
Klein doesn’t go into great detail about how this would happen (he promises to do so in a future podcast), but his premise is that Biden would voluntarily withdraw from the contest and release his delegates not too long before the convention without dictating a successor (like, say, his hand-picked vice-president, Kamala Harris, who would presumably have to fight for the nomination if she wanted it without a heavy-handed presidential assist). In that case, Klein says, Democrats could choose from a deep bench of talented politicians in an unscripted televised drama that would capture a nation that had been dreading a 2020 rematch.
The first thing to understand about this scenario is that it would be entirely unprecedented. Yes, as Klein notes, conventions rather than primaries chose major-party nominees from 1831 through 1968 (from 1972 on, nearly all states have chosen delegates via primaries or caucuses with the limited exception of the Democratic experiment with “super-delegates”). But in each and every case, the conventions were preceded by carefully planned candidacies, some as sure a bet as any multiple-primary winner; the apparent spontaneity of the choice of a nominee was often as contrived as the bought-and-paid-for “spontaneous demonstrations” for candidates that abruptly ended in 1972. In addition, long before primaries dominated nomination contests, they still on occasion had a big impact on the outcome (way back in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft slugged it out in a long series of primaries before dueling in a closely divided convention that wound up splitting the GOP).
The last major-party convention in which the presidential nominee wasn’t known in advance (putting aside a few convention “revolts” that were doomed to fail) was the 1976 Republican confab. And there the gathering was the very opposite of “open”: All but a handful of delegates were pledged to Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan, and the battle was over that undecided handful. Most delegates had zero “choice” over the nominee. There was “drama,” but no sense in which the party was free to choose from an assortment of possible candidates who proved their mettle at the convention itself. The only surprise was Reagan’s decision to announce a proposed running mate (Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker) before the presidential balloting. This was an innovation at the time, which (as it happens) failed.
Yes, the further back you go, there were plenty of major-party conventions that were “deliberative,” in the sense of the nomination not being locked up in advance. Occasionally, the outcome was something of a surprise, most recently in 1940, when a whirlwind propaganda effort by a few wire-pullers and packed galleries produced Indiana utility executive Wendell Willkie as a Republican nominee. But again, the delegates themselves weren’t generally free to deliberate, since many were controlled by state political leaders and others were chosen in primaries.
If you want a truly wide-open convention, the eternal ideal is the Democratic convention held one century ago in New York. The 1924 gathering featured 103 ballots before the exhausted remainder of delegates who hadn’t run out of money or patience chose dark horse James W. Davis as its nominee. Davis went on to win a booming 29 percent of the general-election popular vote and lost every state outside the former Confederacy.
That brings to mind another note of caution about the idea of an “open convention”: a nominee chosen not by primary voters or by a consensus of party leaders is just as likely to produce a calamitous general-election campaign as some burst of enthusiasm among united partisans. The last multi-ballot Democratic convention nominated Adlai Stevenson in 1952. He lost. The last multi-ballot Republican convention chose Thomas Dewey in 1944. He lost. The record of nominees chosen by deliberative (much less contested) conventions isn’t that great generally. Gerald Ford (winner of the aforementioned 1976 Republican convention) lost. His vanquisher, Jimmy Carter, lost in 1980 after a tough primary challenge and then a convention full of buyer’s remorse. The biggest general-election winners in living memory (Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1996, Barack Obama in 2008) were the products of conventions that were virtual coronations.
The 2024 Democratic convention will end on August 22 (assuming it doesn’t go into overtime like the 1924 affair), leaving ten weeks before the general election on November 5. Would a Democratic Party fresh from an “open convention” be able get its act together in that span of time, particularly if the nominee is someone other than a universally known figure? What if there are Democrats who are unhappy with the nominee? When does that get sorted out?
I’m interested in learning more about “open convention” scenarios. But at first blush it seems a far riskier proposition for Democrats than just going with the incumbent president of the United States, the man who was left for dead as a presidential candidate in 2020 more times than you could count.
