{"id":7189,"date":"2006-04-20T10:11:13","date_gmt":"2006-04-20T14:11:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7189"},"modified":"2006-04-20T10:11:13","modified_gmt":"2006-04-20T14:11:13","slug":"klein-misunderestimated-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/klein-misunderestimated-him\/","title":{"rendered":"Klein ‘misunderestimated’ him"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Chait has a good review<\/a> of Joe Klein’s new book, “Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re Stupid,” in the upcoming issue of The New Republic. Apparently, the gist of Klein’s premise is that domestic politics has become “mechanistic and bland” due to emotionless politicians who listen to overly-cautious consultants.<\/p>\n

Chait doesn’t seem to think much of Klein’s case, and highlights some of the more noticeable flaws in Klein’s thesis, but Chait hits Klein the hardest by reminding us how wrong Klein has been<\/a> about Bush.<\/p>\n

Again and again, Bush has exposed the limits of Klein’s theater-critic interpretation of politics. In 1999, marveling over Bushian slogans like “no child left behind,” Klein gushed in The New Yorker that the Texas governor represented “the first significant Republican rebellion against the Reagan template.” In Bush, he found the Republican counterpart to the Clintonian Third Way. […]<\/p>\n

[N]othing could shake Klein from his theory. Not even Bush’s decision to bring on non-compassionate conservative Dick Cheney. “Anybody who tries to take a really strong position on [Cheney] from the left or from the right seems kind of silly,” Klein said of Bush’s vice presidential selection on a “Meet the Press” panel. “We’re all Clintonians now. Everybody is a Third Way Democrat or Republican, you know, and I think that that’s one of the central problems that politicians in both parties face right now, is that there are no huge differences, or at least very few.”<\/p>\n

And then, after the election, Klein predicted that the result would be “a quiet, patient, and persistent bipartisanship,” with no big tax cuts or Supreme Court ideologues. Klein suggested helpfully, “Bush could easily retain Lawrence Summers at Treasury and Richard Holbrooke at the United Nations.” And this scenario could have easily come to pass, provided every other Cabinet-eligible American citizen had been wiped out in a nuclear holocaust.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s been several years, and I have to admit, I’d forgotten how spectacularly wrong Klein and the pundit class in general misjudged Bush before 2001. No wonder so many Americans were willing to believe all that “compassionate conservative” nonsense in the 2000 campaign; “liberals” like Klein were telling everyone that Bush was a moderate who would effectively govern like a Republican Clinton.<\/p>\n

Klein seems to be a special case — he misjudged Bush badly then, and continues<\/a> to be confused<\/a> now — but I still marvel at the way in which Karl Rove crafted a strategy that conned so many people into believing that Bush was a center-right consensus builder who’d govern from the middle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Chait has a good review of Joe Klein’s new book, “Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re Stupid,” in the upcoming issue of The New Republic. Apparently, the gist of Klein’s premise is that domestic politics has become “mechanistic and bland” due to emotionless politicians who listen to overly-cautious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}