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........