Whatever Ezra writes

      Some journalists who comment on politics actually have real influence on politics.

      We remember President Lyndon Johnson’s reaction after the otherwise scrupulously middle-of-the-road CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite criticized America’s military involvement in Vietnam: “If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America," Johnson is said to have moaned. The president decided not to run for re-election a month later.

       During the Civil War, a hundred years earlier, the most influential American journalist of his time, Horace Greeley, published an open letter to President Abraham Lincoln demanding that he free the slaves. Lincoln signed the “Emancipation Proclamation” a little more than a month later.

      Walter Lippmann, the most influential newspaper journalist of his time, created a stir when, in 1936, he turned on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and said he was going to vote for FDR’s opponent.

      New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein is probably not the most influential journalist of our time. That honor belongs, if he qualifies as a journalist, to podcast-star Joe Rogan, who notably endorsed Trump last year. Ezra gets maybe a tenth as large an audience.

      Klein, who started out as a blogger, is thoughtful and decent and tastefully hip. I don’t bother any more recommending his columns and podcasts to my plugged-in friends. I just assume they have already read or listened to them. And Democratic politicians certainly read or listen.

      No doubt, there are other liberal voices who many of us believe to be must reads or listens or watchs: Heather Cox Richardson, for example, or David Remnick, when he weighs in himself, or Rachel Maddow, or Paul Krugman, particularly now that he comes to us without the strictures imposed by the New York Times.

      But there is something else about Ezra that distinguishes him from many other insightful and important progressive journalists today and brings to mind Cronkite, Greeley and Lippmann: He is willing to nudge or even criticize his own party.

      In February of 2024, Ezra recorded a podcast for The Times entitled “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden.”

      Dump the leader of the party you support? Dump the incumbent president? Mon Dieu! 

      But Klein’s podcast opened just a little the “Overton Window”—the range of generally acceptable ideas—to that previously radical sounding notion. And other Democrats began considering, occasionally publically, a possible campaign without Joe Biden as the nominee.

      All it took was that and the worst performance ever in the history of presidential debates for the Democrats to get themselves a younger, fresher—though perhaps not as comfortable for Joe-Rogan white guys—candidate.

      Ezra had demonstrated some persuasive power—if not Cronkite- or Rogan-level influence. He had displayed considerable guts. Or maybe he had just demonstrated some ability to sense in which direction things were moving.

      Lincoln had apparently drafted the Emancipation Proclamation before Greeley published his open letter. Maybe one great mind, Horace Greeley, had sensed what another great mind was ready to do.

      This past weekend Ezra Klein helped lug another awkward idea into the Overton Window and in the process took on congressional Democratic leaders. He called on Democrats to borrow a trick from Republicans and refuse to do what is necessary to fund Trump’s government—which would mean not funding the United States government. Mon Dieu! Democrats are supposed to be the reasonable ones. Shutting down the government is for the crazies.

      American troops remained in Vietnam for five years after Walter Cronkite soured on the war.

      Franklin Roosevelt was reelected and reelected again and reelected again after losing Walter Lippmann’s support.  

      I don’t want to exaggerate the political power a journalist can wield. And Ezra Klein was not the only one calling for Democrats to allow the government to shut down.

      But maybe Ezra has sensed that Democrats are tired of playing nice. (Robert Reich endorsed the idea, crediting Ezra, yesterday.)

      And, in such matters, Ezra Klein may currently matter more than any other journalist on the center-left.

      Don’t be surprised if that shutdown of the corrupt and lawless government of Donald J. Trump happens.