It’s years now since I asked the question, “Whatever happened to Joe Klein?” Could be the memory’s fuzzy and I never wondered at all about Klein’s relative disappearance. As many remember, Klein was a “celebrated” (often not without merit) “elite” media presence in the 1980s and 90s, writing for, most notably, New York, Newsweek, Time and The New Yorker, and, along with Michael Kinsely, Robert Novak, David Broder, Pat Buchanan… and all the rest, a regular on the weekend talk shows. He was a print nomad, like Andrew Sullivan, but not a dick.
He was sometimes obnoxious, sometimes funny, and I read his stories with a fair amount of interest. Granted, it was a different media era, with newsstands everywhere you went, but Klein wasn’t a mere shill (or bore) like, say Eleanor Clift, Frank Rich, Dave Barry or Anna Quindlen. Klein’s January 20th 1992 profile of Bill Clinton in New York (just before the Gennifer Flowers blow-up, draft record discrepancies and Hillary claiming she wasn’t no damn Tammy Wynette broke ahead of the Feb. 18th New Hampshire primary—which Sen. Paul Tsongas won) was the key early look at the ultimately fraudulent Man From Hope.
I also read Klein in The Real Paper and Rolling Stone, and my brother gave me his book Woody Guthrie: A Life for Christmas in 1982, but read 40 pages and put on a shelf. Not the case for his initially anonymous Primary Colors in 1996—after denials, he fessed up to his authorship months after publication—which was a hilarious, and nasty, read, and Klein’s prime achievement. And I also liked the 1998 movie version, also called Primary Colors, and despite an aversion to John Travolta, he was aces as Clinton, as were his co-stars Emma Thompson (a perfect Hillary), Billy Bob Thornton, Adrian Lester and Kathy Bates.
Anyway, last week I saw a link on Twitter to a Klein Substack post, and, intrigued, clicked away. I’ve zero idea how Substack stacks up financially, but it’s infrastructure is screwy: for this story I wanted to subscribe to Klein’s column, but was notified that I’d already done so. Not true! But, reversing a complaint a lady said in The New York Times in the early-1990s when the short-lived Coca-Cola merchandise story opened, “a little free something would be nice!” I was, very low-grade, luckier than her. I guess it wasn’t surprising that Matt Yglesias, perhaps the most useless commentator today, is reported to earn around $1 million/per annum for his “Slow Boring” Substack.
After reading Klein’s “American Aedile,” I wasn’t impressed. I guess Klein has TDS, which is standard among his (former?) ilk, but he doesn’t have much to add to “the national conversation.” He sprinkles in “MAGAfools,” Lake America, “potty-mouth,” Mickey D’s, Natalie Harp (“from his wardrobe of blondes”), and Trump’s garish taste. Pickin’ and choosin’.
This snippet is more self-incriminating than anything he says about Trump: “Some of us, from Queens, figured out the subtleties of Manhattan. We were humble, and gradually migrated through Brooks Brothers into the corridors of the elite. He didn’t. He tried to overwhelm the sophisticated swells [mercifully, a since-abandoned 1990s term, most often found in Conde Nast glossies and “Page Six”] with his banal view of ‘class.’ He had no idea.”
Trump isn’t “book-smart” or “humble,” like Klein, but I doubt he ever had illusions of possessing “class.”
Then: “He doesn’t look too good these days. Suddenly there are a bunch of doctors opining in print… that he is in the process of shuffling off this mortal coil… He no longer seems a strongman.” Trump is 80; on Sept. 7th, Klein will also reach that age. I don’t know the man, wish him no ill will; and perhaps his cliché-studded, I’m-doing-this-because-I’m-supposed-to prose is simply a sign of detachment or boredom.
After saying that Jared Kushner’s “own monumental thieveries [are] nearly complete,” he praises Trump’s son-in-law as “serious” and for meeting with Hakim Jeffries to work together after the midterms (on the valid assumption the Democrats win the House in November). And then Klein blasts the DSA. “Various left-wing Democrats are savaging Jeffries for giving Jared [first-name basis!] the time of day—but those who call themselves ‘socialists’ don’t care about getting anything done. Like Trump, they don’t know how; they just want to throw cow-pucky at the oligarchs. The DSAs and MAGAs deserve each other.”
I wonder if “cow-pucky” was a recess insult at the Hackley School, the prep school in Tarrytown, New York (not Queens) that Klein went before The University of Pennsylvania.
His conclusion is one that even David French might roll his eyes at. “Trump may be the greatest fraud in history. But he doesn’t lack power. He—and his enablers on the idiot left—can destroy the magnificent thing we created here. Democracy demands subtlety, it demands work. But… Let the Games Continue!”
Lesson learned: Klein was one of the Founding Fathers, taking credit for the magnificent thing we created here.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023