Blowhard Time pundit sings a song of himself

When Joe Klein signed up with Time magazine as a political columnist in 2003, he turned to this quote from Teddy Roosevelt for the name of his weekly dispatch, which he dubbed "In the Arena": "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. ... The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood ... and who, at worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly."

Klein has written that he intended the reference as a sort of self-effacing rebuke, a constant reminder that he is but a humble critic who chronicles the doings of deeds. But to believe that interpretation, one must ignore the fact that Klein's body of work amounts to little more than a festival of projection and poorly disguised vanity. This is the man, after all, who, unsatisfied with writing about Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign as a mere critic, rather famously refashioned himself into a central player in that campaign in his 1996 novel, Primary Colors. If Joe Klein is contemplating a man in an arena, his face marred by dust and sweat and blood, daring greatly, you can rest assured that the man he is contemplating is Joe Klein.

If Joe Klein is contemplating a man in an arena, his face marred by dust and sweat and blood, daring greatly, you can rest assured that the man he is contemplating is Joe Klein

And, oh, how our hero has dared in the arena of late! For the past three weeks, Klein has been the subject of withering attacks from left-wing bloggers after he wrote, falsely, in his November 21 column that the Democratic proposal for amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would "give the terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." The debate is arcane and ludicrously complicated, and it has generated literally tens of thousands of words online and in print, mostly condemning Klein, and most of them from Salon's Glenn Greenwald (who, God love him, has approached his subject with the tenacity and righteousness of an obsessive-compulsive IRS auditor). But suffice it to say that (a) Klein made a stupid error, and (b) his preposterously arrogant and ham-fisted attempts to walk himself back from that error have almost rendered reasonable Greenwald's claim that the episode illustrates "everything that is rancid and corrupt with our political media."

The FISA dispute is but the latest skirmish in an ongoing campaign that has been marring Klein's brow with dust and blood and sweat since January, when Time launched its political blog, Swampland. Klein is one of its regular contributors, and there is no better conceivable foil than he for the blogocentric criticism that the political journalism establishment is populated by preening, clueless, lazy, and pompous regurgitators of conventional wisdom. Swampland's commenters have joined the battle with glee; the first comment to one of Klein's first posts on Swampland read simply: "Just because I hate to see the lefties get all the credit, let the record show that at least one moderate Republican finds you despicable." More than 3,000 comments followed that post alone, and the vicious mockery has continued, virtually unabated, all year.

Klein's reactions on Swampland to his FISA critics are precious goldmines of self-aggrandizing pretense that must be savored at length to appreciate their rich subtleties and overtones. His first response acknowledged—in an insufferably cloying way—that although partisan murk clouded the issue, he "may" have made a mistake, before going on to claim that if he indeed had made a mistake, "we are talking about relatively obscure and unimportant technical details." In other words, Klein sat down to write a column about obscure and unimportant technical details.

Klein's next weigh-in on the blog, two days later, was headlined "FISA: More Than You Want to Know," as though his responsibility to assess the veracity or lack thereof of the claims he made in his columns involved some kind of burdensome slog through legislative thickets beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. Why are you making me do this? This is hard! His post artfully shifted the issue from whether the bill says what he said it says to whether his Republican sources or Democratic sources were correct in their interpretations (who knows? This law stuff is complicated) before actually committing to pixels the following words, which will live on as one of the finest specimens of sheer journalistic hubris ever issued from one of the genre's most accomplished practitioners: "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." I don't have time find out if what I write is true, people! I'm too busy claiming that other things are true. And even if I did have time, I'm not qualified to say whether the things I write are true anyway!

Photo: Getty Images

Mercifully, that was Klein's last comment on the issue before issuing a correction acknowledging that "the bill does not explicitly say" what he said it says (though Time stupidly posted a correction online that was weaker, claiming only that there was a partisan dispute, resulting in a correction to the correction).

It's that sort of unrestrained ego that has turned Klein's foray into the world of blogging into what has become, essentially, a yearlong self-immolation. His style is suited—if it is suited to any kind of journalism—to the sort of self-inflating pronouncements that Time's print edition encourages. To wit: In June, Time published a feature called "The Courage Primary," wherein Klein laid out his political program, chock-full of policy prescriptions swaddled in mawkish and content-free bromides that would make Dan Rather, he of the "courage" sign-off, proud.
Combine his posturing style with a vanishingly thin skin, put it online, and you get the periodic hissy fits that have seized Klein since he started blogging
"[O]ccasionally, there comes an election where the ability to be courageous, to tell the public things it may not want to hear, is the most important quality we need in a leader. I suspect that 2008 will be that sort of election." The piece amounted to a primer on The Joe Klein Primary—a guide to the candidates on how to get his support, with the implication that divergence from his prescriptions constituted cowardice. Fine. He's a pundit. That's what they do. But the penultimate paragraph offers a window into a mind that has been blinded by self-regard: "As I've thought about these issues, a pattern has emerged: They are synergistic, mutually reinforcing. They fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. ... When you put the jigsaw puzzle together, the nation that emerges is more equitable, more efficient, with a reinvigorated citizenry—a safer and more powerful nation, braced by the power of moral example as well as military supremacy." Huzzah! Can you make the nation more equitable, efficient, safe, powerful, and invigorated in 4,300 words or less, Glenn Greenwald? I didn't think so! When Klein writes about the courage necessary to lead the country out of its current quagmire, he's thinking of someone in the arena, amid the blood, sweat, and dust. And it's not one of the candidates.

Combine that posturing style with a vanishingly thin skin, put it online, and you get the periodic hissy fits that have seized Klein since he started blogging. In June, he wrote a column called "Beware the Blogger's Bile," which recounted an episode in which he reported—falsely—on Swampland that Rep. Jane Harman had voted for a bill to fund the Iraq war, and was "blasted by a number of left-wing bloggers: Klein screwed up!" The lesson, Klein argued, was that "a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance ... has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere." True, except—Klein did screw up! Harman had misinformed him about the way she was going to vote, so it was an understandable error (though one that a check of the Congressional Record would have avoided). But is the time you got something wrong, and the left-wing blogosphere correctly (if rudely) hammered you about getting that thing wrong, really the best set of facts with which to make your case against the left-wing blogosphere? As with the FISA case, a simple "I made a mistake" would have sufficed.

In a bizarre and revealing podcast that Time posted on Swampland as a companion to the column, Klein railed wildly against the insolence of those who dared to criticize his reporting, repeating four times that he'd been doing this for 38 years, which is apparently long enough to have earned the right to be wrong without people hassling you about it. In the space of 10 minutes, he bragged about how he "[hasn't] called the White House in years" to deflect criticism that he spouts the Administration's line, and then criticized Greenwald for failing to call him. Referring to the Harman error, Klein said, "[T]his is a war we're talking about, and I don't really care about these stupid little details. ... The important thing here was my feeling that voting against the war funding was a bad idea." As with the FISA column, the way Klein felt was important; the factual error he made in advancing his argument was a stupid little detail.

The subtext to Klein's blog tantrum is the galling fact that his attackers are coming from the left. Klein wrote a biography of Woody Guthrie, for Christ's sake! Don't his attackers realize that he's a liberal? That he hates Bush as much as the next guy? That he's Joe Klein?

In a couple weeks, for his year-end column, Klein will distribute his "Teddy Awards," which he does every year in a tip of the hat to public figures who have "performed honorably as winners and losers in the public arena," and, per Roosevelt's stirring words, honor those who, if they've failed, have done so while "daring greatly."

Past winners have included George W. Bush and David Petraeus; it's anybody's guess who'll get the nod this year. But I know who Joe Klein really wants to give it to.

Photo: Vince Bucci/AFP/Getty Images