Calling Jon Chait

Over at The Plank, Christopher Orr points out that, if you're a journalist and you give your opinion to a politician--in person, in a column, whatever--it doesn't really matter if your intent is abstracted from politics--your words function similarly to professional advice. I'm going to excerpt a lot of this, because there's an important point to be made here about the roll of journalists:

"For example," [Joe] Klein explains, "[Bob] Shrum asked me at one point how I'd feel if Kerry voted against the $87 billion funding proposal for the troops. I said I didn't think it would be a good idea, since he voted for the war." To the casual observer it might seem that Klein was telling Shrum what he thought Kerry ought to do. But sophisticated parsing reveals that he was merely making an abstract analysis ("opinion") rather than explicitly recommending any particular course of action ("advice"). I found myself in a similar situation recently, when my three-year-old son expressed his intention to take a toy fire truck away from his little sister, and I said that he'd get in trouble if he did. I was not telling him what to do, but rather making a disinterested observation about the likely consequences of his actions.

For those having trouble following, Klein offers another example: "So when Kerry asked me if he should fire Jim Jordan, I said, 'I have no idea what's going on inside your campaign and I don't really care. All I know is you're not nearly as clear or compelling as Howard Dean on the stump'--which I'd written several times--'and changing your campaign manager probably isn't going to help that.'" Here again, Klein is not, as it might first appear, advising against firing Jordan, he's merely offering his opinion that it's a bad idea--with the generous caveats that he really has no idea what he's talking about and doesn't actually care anyway.

This is the sort of bizarre thinking that seems to run amok at The New Republic these days. Take the recent Jon Chait article--and the ensuing debate--about the netroots. In the end, between the article and the rebuttals and the surrebuttals, something like 12,000 words were tossed about to make the point that, because liberal bloggers are hoping to achieve political goals, their writings should be viewed suspiciously. This analysis sort of neglects the idea that high-profile netrootsers like Kos, much like high profile opinion journalists like staff-writers at The New Republic, are public figures writing publicly about matters of great importance to the public.

It's a view of things that clouds what is the otherwise perfectly clear purpose of public opinion by requiring readers to try to put themselves into a writer's frame of mind--and I don't see what that gets you in the end. If you consume public opinion, you likely as not probably do so critically and, in addition to evaluating an article based upon its source, also evaluate it based upon its merits. I don't see why its either a surprise, or by definition a bad thing, when politicians take an opinion-makers' opinion and treat that opinion as advice. Why else would so many people want to be in Joe Klein's type of journalism? If you hope that politicians turn a blind eye to everything you write or say, then there's no reason to do this stuff. If, on the other hand, you think your work as a journalist will have some small impact of the world, then it's a natural extension of your daily duties to give your opinions directly to politicians, instead of waiting a day or a week for that same politician to read that opinion in a magazine or on the Internet.

This is all to say that in this business nobody actually hopes that powerful people totally ignore their ideas. If Christopher needs evidence of this, he should ask the people around his office whether they wanted their writings on Iraq to be influential or not, and whether, when that war came to be, they felt any ownership of it.