Tag: Ezra Klein

Thugs assault U.S. senator for asking a question; plus, showdown for public media, and an odd omission

Click on image for the ABC News report

This morning I feel like anyone who comments on media and politics ought to say something about Thursday’s unprovoked assault on U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla. But I’m at a loss for words. I assume you’ve seen it; if you haven’t, here it is (gift link), along with a detailed New York Times account.

Federal agents are seen dragging the California Democrat from a room where Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was holding a news conference, forcing him to the floor and handcuffing him. He was soon released and was not charged, but this is what an authoritarianism takeover looks like.

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I was interested that Noem at least had the presence of mind to lie, falsely claiming that Padilla had “lunged” toward the stage and didn’t identify himself. All you have to do is watch the video to see the truth. All he was trying to do was ask a question. And, of course, Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have picked up on her lies. Heather Cox Richardson writes:

While much focus has been on the assault itself, what Noem was saying before Padilla spoke out is crucially important. “We are not going away,” she said. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

In other words, the Trump administration is vowing to get rid of the democratically elected government of California by using military force. That threat is the definition of a coup. It suggests MAGA considers any political victory but their own to be illegitimate and considers themselves justified in removing those governmental officials with violence: a continuation of the attempt of January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of a presidential election.

Finally, I am never going to mention Noem without reminding you that she bragged about shooting her dog and her goat.

Public media’s last stand

I had hoped that President Trump’s plunge in the polls might stiffen the spines of House Republicans enough that they would not vote to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides some of the revenues for PBS and NPR. No such luck.

As NPR reports, the House voted on Thursday to eliminate $1.1 billion in previously appropriated money that was supposed to fund CPB for the next two years. Another $8.3 billion was cut from international-aid programs. The measure passed, 214 to 212, with every Democrat and four Republicans voting against it.

So now it’s on to the Senate, where the Republican majority is slightly less right-wing than the House’s. At this point, though, all bets are off.

A curious omission

There is so much going on, nearly all of it bad, that I’m going to have to leave most of it aside. But I do want to mention that on Thursday I listened to Ezra Klein’s New York Times interview (you can subscribe to “The Ezra Klein Show for free at all the usual podcast haunts) with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who has accused the Netanyahu government of committing war crimes in Gaza.

It was a long, fascinating conversation. Yet there was scarcely a mention of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program and none at all of the possibility that Israel would soon act to destroy it — something that definitely had been in the news lately.

And now Israel has attacked Iran. In retrospect, it seems like a lost opportunity.

Ann Telnaes’ Pulitzer sends a message to Jeff Bezos; plus, Pulitzer notes, and Ezra Klein blurs a line

Ann Telnaes is a worthy recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for illustrated reporting and commentary; after all, she previously won in 2001, and she was a finalist in 2022. Her winning portfolio is trademark Telnaes, portraying Donald Trump as a dumpy, orange-faced gnome who somehow manages to be simultaneously menacing and pathetic.

At the same time, I think it’s unavoidable to conclude that the Pulitzer judges, in recognizing Telnaes, were sending a message to Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Telnaes quit in January after opinion editor David Shipley killed a cartoon that made fun of billionaires for sucking up to Donald Trump — including Bezos.

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Shipley later followed Telnaes out the door after Bezos decreed that the Post’s opinion pages would henceforth be dedicated exclusively to “personal liberties and free markets.”

As Poynter media columnist Tom Jones observes, the Pulitzer board took note of Telnaes’ departure earlier this year by hailing her “fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years.”

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Biden’s age and health: A legitimate story that was marred by media excess

Photo (cc) 2020 by deckerme

We were on our way back from a family gathering in upstate New York when we learned that President Biden had stepped aside from his re-election campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. I was checking social media at the Lee rest stop on the Mass Pike eastbound; I think I was about an hour behind. We’d been anticipating the moment for days, if not weeks. Still, it came as a surprise.

I’m hearing some people grouse that Biden should have acted sooner, but this had to be incredibly difficult. No doubt he believes he can still do the job. What he couldn’t do was govern and campaign simultaneously. Nor was it reasonable to expect voters to believe he could serve more than a fraction of a second term. He’s now given us the best chance of beating Donald Trump and the authoritarian menace he represents.

Harris is an accomplished leader who, after all, is already the elected vice president. Opening up the process to some sort of vague celebrity bakeoff could have led to disaster. Can Harris win? I don’t know. Every possible choice was a risk, but I think giving her a chance of claiming the nomination quickly is less of a risk than continuing with Biden or having an open convention. (To be clear: It will still be an open convention.)

There’s one important media angle to all this that I think needs to be addressed. It really looks like Biden was driven out of the campaign by the press, and that’s not a good perception. There have been stories over the past year or two suggesting that Biden shouldn’t run for re-election because of his advanced age, the three most notable being a Mark Leibovich piece in The Atlantic in 2022, an Ezra Klein commentary in The New York Times this past February, and a Wall Street Journal article in early June. But Biden’s age-related problems have been a 24/7 obsession since about 9:10 p.m. on June 27, when it became clear in the presidential debate that something was seriously wrong.

Many diehard Biden supporters have erupted in fury at the media, and especially the Times, for publishing story after story after story about Biden’s infirmities while not dwelling nearly as much on Trump’s far worse deficits. There are many on the left who’ve come to the conclusion that the corporate media — I’m not using quotation marks because there really is a corporate media — want to see Trump back in office for ratings and circulation. I don’t think that’s the case. Biden’s age, questions about his cognitive health, and fading electoral prospects were a huge and entirely legitimate story. But that doesn’t mean the media covered themselves in glory.

My own belief is that the media — again, led by the Times — were shocked and horrified by the prospect of Trump’s return to the White House, so they embarked on an overwrought effort to bring Biden’s campaign to a close. The Times put it this way in an editorial today: “Had he remained at the top of the ticket, he would have greatly increased the likelihood of Mr. Trump retaking the presidency and potentially controlling both houses of Congress as well.” That’s not just a statement of truth; it’s also an explanation for the media behavior we’ve seen over the past three weeks.

Jon Keller of WBZ-TV asked me the other day if this was evidence of “bias.” I responded that yes, I suppose it was. But it was bias in favor of democracy, something that media observers such as Margaret Sullivan and Jay Rosen have been calling for from the start of the campaign. This is not Bill Clinton versus Bob Dole in 1996. Trump represents an existential threat to democracy.

Still, the media excesses were notable, especially a Times report that a physician who specializes in Parkinson’s disease had visited the White House repeatedly. That was just irresponsible journalism. It didn’t pan out, and no evidence has emerged that Biden has Parkinson’s. Another example of excess was published by The New Yorker last week, in which nine physicians were allowed to speculate anonymously about the state of Biden’s neurological health. Now, I have to say that the story was interesting and possibly shed some light. But that doesn’t mean it should have been published.

President Biden said he will address the nation later this week. He could do Harris a lot of good if he acknowledges that he’s leaving not because of the media, not because fundraising had dried up, not because Nancy Pelosi told him to, but because his age and his health had finally caught up with him. And the media should ask themselves how they once again managed to turn a legitimate story into the only story for the past three weeks, embarrassing themselves and calling their judgment and fairness into question.

Biden has been an outstanding president, and he cements his legacy by knowing when it’s time to leave. He deserves our respect and gratitude. We are all going to miss his steady hand come next January, regardless of who succeeds him.

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Dems in disarray — and this time it’s warranted as calls mount for Biden to drop out

For once, the pundit freakout is justified. Those of us who watched Thursday night’s debate between President Biden and Donald Trump saw an enfeebled, fumble-mouthed incumbent who was utterly unequipped to stand up to the blizzard of lies unleashed by his felonious, insurrection-inciting opponent.

Biden has been an excellent president in many ways, but he needs to announce as soon as possible that he’s ending his campaign for re-election. Ezra Klein laid out a path back in February, and at the time he was widely mocked for it. Now he looks prescient. The president should release his delegates and allow the Democratic National Convention to choose a candidate, who, in turn, will choose a running mate. I like the idea of a Gretchen Whitmer-Cory Booker ticket — or the reverse. But Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom and others would probably be in the mix as well.

What happened? I honestly thought Biden had put concerns about his age to rest at his State of the Union address. Reading a speech is one thing, but he was mixing it up with the Republicans, ad libbing, obviously enjoying himself. Could things have really changed that much in a few months? Or is he like many people in their 80s who can have a good night or a bad night? We learned that he had a cold, which explains why his voice was so raspy and soft. But that doesn’t explain why he had such trouble forming his thoughts, articulating obvious talking points about issues like abortion rights, and standing up to Trump’s lies with specifics. “We finally beat Medicare” was a line that will stand as one of the defining moments of the evening.

I thought CNN’s moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, were OK. They should have asked Trump right off the bat about democracy and his status as a convicted felon rather than waiting until later on, by which time many viewers had probably changed the channel. They’re taking a lot of grief on social media for not fact-checking Trump, but it’s been reported that the rules were set ahead of time. Of course, telling Trump that no one will be fact-checking him was an act of grotesque irresponsibility. Team Biden should have insisted otherwise, but no doubt they went along with it because Biden really, really wanted this debate.

Biden got stronger as the night wore on. His voice recovered to some degree and he landed a few blows. Rather than the vacant, slack-jawed stare he displayed during the split screen early in the debate, he started to appear more animated and smiled a few times. By then it was too late. And his closing statement, which should have been his easiest task of the night, devolved into complete incoherence.

And let’s pause for a moment and emphasize that Trump turned in the second-worst debate performance by any presidential candidate in the television age, exceeded only by his own COVID-spewing yellfest in the first 2020 debate. He was completely untethered from reality. But he made it work, acting very much like himself, seemingly unaffected by his own advanced age.

Finally, a word about the media, which has been obsessing over Biden’s age for many months. A lot of us have been critical, thinking it was both unwarranted and unfair given that Trump is only three years younger and appears to have plenty of cognitive issues of his own. Trump, though, is loud and talks fast, and in that respect doesn’t seem that much different from when he was running against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Now it turns out that the scrutiny of Biden’s age was warranted, and perhaps we should have been paying more attention rather than dismissing it.

Sometime in the next few days, I hope, Democratic Party leaders, including former President Barack Obama, will pay Biden a visit and deliver an uncomfortable message: for the good of the party — for the good of the country — he has to step aside. All along, the calculation has been whether Trump could be more easily defeated by Biden or by someone else. Around 9:10 p.m. on Thursday, that calculation moved firmly to “someone else.”

Authoritarianism is on the march. A neo-fascist party seems likely to win the French election. Italy is ruled by an extreme right-wing government. Putin and Xi are becoming increasingly repressive. Modi has all but extinguished democracy in India. The U.S. can’t join them — and President Biden, a good and decent man, can’t let himself be used to pave the way for autocracy. It’s time for someone new.

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Josh Marshall to Ezra Klein: Biden isn’t going anywhere

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has written a long response to Ezra Klein’s fantasy idea of persuading President Biden to drop out of the campaign and throw the nomination open to the Democratic National Convention this August. The whole thing is worth your time, but here’s Marshall’s bottom line:

In life we constantly need to make choices on the basis of available options. Often they are imperfect or even bad options. The real options are the ones that have some shot at success. That’s life. Klein’s argument really amounts to a highly pessimistic but not unreasonable analysis of the present situation which he resolves with what amounts to a deus ex machina plot twist. That’s not a plan. It’s a recipe for paralysis.

Klein is smart and thoughtful, and his proposal is not a lazy one-off but, rather, well argued and evidence-based. But it’s not going to happen, and it almost certainly shouldn’t happen. Marshall has found the flaws.

Earlier:

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Is Ezra Klein’s call for Biden to stand aside realistic or desirable? Probably not.

Then-candidate Joe Biden. Photo (cc) 2019 by Matt Johnson.

You may have heard that Ezra Klein has called for President Biden to pull out of the campaign and let a younger generation of Democrats compete for the nomination. Klein, who hosts a podcast and writes commentaries for The New York Times, is someone I look to for guidance. This isn’t just the Times being the Times; Klein was a prominent thinker and commentator before coming to the Times, and he will continue to be long after he leaves.

You can listen or read what Klein has to say here. There’s not a lot of analysis I want to add except to say that he’s thought through most of the objections. He believes Biden has been an effective president and could continue to be in a second term, but that his age has become a real obstacle to his re-election — and that the stakes are way too high to take the chance that Donald Trump could return to the White House. Yes, Trump is nearly as old, far more addled, and, unlike Biden, faces 91 criminal charges and has all but pledged to rule as an authoritarian. Klein believes that anything that keeps Trump out of power is worth doing, even if it means somehow persuading Biden to call it a career.

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Probably my main objection to Klein’s idea is that it’s so late. If Biden had pulled out a year ago, we could have had a proper primary campaign. So what is Klein’s alternative? Throwing it to the Democratic National Convention in August, a truly risky move. “There is a ton of talent in the Democratic Party right now,” Klein writes, and he offers a long list that, intriguingly, omits California Gov. Gavin Newsom and includes Georgia Sen. Ralph Warnock. I’m skeptical of Newsom, and I have to say that I like the idea of Warnock.*

Another problem that Klein has given some thought to is what to do about Vice President Kamala Harris. His answer is that she is a better and more appealing politician than she’s generally given credit for, and that she could compete at the convention like everyone else. If she wins, she wins; if she loses, that’s not a reason to believe that the party would be torn apart. I’m not so sure about that, but Klein puts it this way:

Could it go badly? Sure. But that doesn’t mean it will go badly. It could make the Democrats into the most exciting political show on earth. And over there on the other side will be Trump getting nominated and a who’s who of MAGA types slavering over his leadership. The best of the Democratic Party against the worst of the Republican Party. A party that actually listened to the voters against a party that denies the outcome of the elections. A party that did something different over a party that has again nominated a threat to democracy who has never — not once — won the popular vote in a general election.

I’d say my biggest objection is that Klein would reward special counsel Robert Hur, who recently cleared Biden of criminal wrongdoing in his retention of classified documents but then gratuitously smeared him by suggesting that the president is senile. It was a gross example of prosecutorial misconduct. But that doesn’t mean concerns about Biden’s age aren’t real. As Klein notes, he may be sharp and focused in private (just ask Kevin McCarthy), but he’s slowed down in public, and his own campaign seems to be trying to hide him from scrutiny.

The issues involved are difficult to sort out. In addition to Hur’s actions, which ought to be investigated, there is also the media’s wildly disproportionate coverage of Biden’s age. It’s a legitimate story, of course, but it’s gotten far too much attention when compared with more important stories, many of them having to do with Trump’s dangerous and outrageous pronouncements. In addition, the notion that Biden will stand down is almost certainly wishful thinking — that is, if you’re even wishing for it. “The sky is blue and Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic Party’s nominee,” as Josh Marshall puts it.

Anyway, Ezra Klein’s piece is worth a read or a listen at least as a thought exercise. It seems pretty obvious that if we’re going to stop Trump, it’s going to have to be with Biden. But Klein’s counter-factual is pretty interesting.

*Correction: I swear I can’t read. Newsom is on Klein’s list. I’m still skeptical of him, though.

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A lament for the downsizing of middleweight media

I guess it’s Ezra Klein Week at Media Nation, because he published something earlier this week that’s getting a lot of buzz: a lament for the downsizing of the music website Pitchfork, which is being absorbed by GQ, a sister publication in the Condé Nast universe.

Klein’s argument is that the largest media outlets, like The New York Times and a very few others, are doing all right, as are the smallest, such as one-person paid newsletters on Substack. It’s the middle, represented by publications such as Pitchfork, BuzzFeed News, Vice and HuffPost, that’s being lost. Klein writes (free link):

You can thrive being very small or very big, but it’s extremely hard to even survive between those poles. That’s a disaster for journalism — and for readers. The middle can be more specific and strange and experimental than mass publications, and it can be more ambitious and reported and considered than the smaller players. The middle is where a lot of great journalists are found and trained. The middle is where local reporting happens and where culture is made rather than discovered.

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‘The Big Dig,’ from GBH News, is a triumph of long-form audio journalism

The yellow is the path of what would become the Tip O’Neill Tunnel through the city. The red and blue are the Ted Williams Tunnel to Logan Airport. Photo (cc) from the 1990s by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.

Over the past few months, news organizations in Boston have unveiled massive projects that dig deeply into traumatic (for very different reasons) historical events — The Boston Globe’s series on the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart at the hands of her husband, Charles, whose claim that the killing was carried out by a Black man turned the city upside-down; and GBH News’ nine-part podcast on the Big Dig.

I approached both projects with some trepidation, wondering what more I could learn about such well-known events. Well, the Globe’s series and podcast were incredibly well done, and we did learn a few things we didn’t previously know; I did not see the Stuart documentary film made in conjunction with the series, but I understand it’s essentially a shortened version of the podcast. “The Big Dig” (that is, the podcast, not the tunnels) was outstanding as well. I just finished listening to it a couple of days ago.

Once I started “The Big Dig,” I got hooked because of the premise. We live at a time when it seems that we’re unable to build great public projects. They come in way over budget, they’re flawed and NIMBYs are able to keep them tied up for years. The way host and co-producer Ian Coss frames the podcast is that the Big Dig is among the earliest and most expensive examples of that phenomenon. As we all know, it cost far more than initial projections, it was years late, it was fatally flawed (literally) and opponents were able to tie it up in red tape.

It’s a dilemma that Ezra Klein of The New York Times has talked about a lot on his own podcast. Rather than liberalism that fetishizes process and empowers stakeholders (and non-stakeholders) in such a way that it makes it too easy to stop progress, he argues, we need a “liberalism that builds.” That will also be the topic of his next book, co-authored with Derek Thompson.

“The Big Dig” begins with an unusually righteous example of process liberalism — the fight to stop the Southwest Corridor, led by a bright young bureaucrat named Fred Salvucci and eventually embraced by Gov. Frank Sargent. Salvucci, whose voice holds together the podcast throughout all nine episodes (he’s now 83), rose to become secretary of transportation under Gov. Michael Dukakis and embraced the two projects that eventually became known as the Big Dig: the Ted Williams Tunnel connecting the city with Logan Airport and the Tip O’Neill Tunnel, which enabled Salvucci’s dream of removing the elevated Central Artery and knitting the city back together.

It makes no sense for me to summarize the podcast except to say that Coss does a masterful job of including a tremendous amount of detail and human-interest stories while keeping it moving. We learn all about Scheme Z, a phrase that I thought I’d never hear out loud again. The greedy parking lot owner who held up the airport tunnel. The soil that was softer than expected. The flaws in the slurry walls. That said, I do have three reservations.

  • At the end of episode 8, the Big Dig is portrayed as unsafe. Although Coss tells us that the improperly installed ceiling tiles that led to the death of a driver, Milena Delvalle, were fixed, you do not get the impression that the overall project was safe. Yet in episode 9, the epilogue, we learn that the Big Dig finally can be seen as a success story without any indication of how those safety problems — including significant leaks in the slurry walls — were overcome.
  • A personal pique, but audio clips of my friend and former GBH colleague Emily Rooney, who hosted “Greater Boston” and “Beat the Press” for many years, are heard over and over, especially in episodes 7 and 8 — yet she is never named. Even Howie Carr is identified after one brief snippet of sound. Emily was the face and voice of GBH News for many years, and she should have gotten a mention.
  • The series closes with the launch of the Green Line Extension, which is presented as a triumphant last piece of the puzzle. “It felt good to feel good about a big project that our city had accomplished,” Coss says. “To put the cynicism away for a day and just enjoy the ride.” Now, I’m sure the lead time for the podcast was long, but, uh.

Overall, though, “The Big Dig” is an extraordinarily well-done overview of a project that kept the city tied up in knots for years, and that has been a success despite the astronomical cost — more than $24 billion by some estimates, or triple the $7.7 billion that was budgeted once the work had started, which was itself far higher than the original $3 billion price tag.

I hope GBH got the bounce they were looking for, because I’d like to see more such podcasts in the future. And if you’re new to Boston, you learn a lot about our city from both the Globe’s reporting on the Stuart case and from “The Big Dig.” Along with J. Anthony Lukas’ book “Common Ground,” the story of Boston’s desegregation crisis, these two works of extended narrative journalism have entered the library of essential Boston reading and listening.

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A smart though dispiriting conversation on how Israel should deal with Hamas

Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast is always worth listening to, and now he’s back at the mic following a break so that he could finish a book project. I recommend this conversation with Zack Beauchamp of Vox, who recently wrote a deeply reported article headlined “What Israel should do now.” I should go back and read it, though I doubt I’m going to learn anything I didn’t already learn from the wide-ranging, hour-long podcast.

I couldn’t possibly summarize everything that Beauchamp and Klein have to say, but the top-line takeaway is that Israel should stop its all-out war in Gaza and instead switch to a counterterrorism campaign aimed at rooting out the Hamas leadership — and that should include targeted assassinations. The reason (other than basic decency), Beauchamp explains, is that Hamas wants as many Palestinian civilians to die as possible in order to advance its propaganda efforts.

Even if Israel is successful at ending the terrorist threat, it’s not at all clear what should happen next. It’s a horrible dilemma with no good solutions.

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