I read Mickey daily.
The Wonk Who Blogged Me
Liberal iconoclast Mickey Kaus suits up, hunkers down, and leaps into the mosh pit
by RJ Smith - Los Angeles Magazine
WHAT'S UP WITH SNARKY? That only sounds like a new teen movie. But for months I've been wondering how come this useful, off-the-trails word has made such a comeback it has almost become a cliché. Now I think I know: It's a small illustration of the growing power of Web logs, or blogs. Online journals that can be about anything from national politics to one person's obsession with Ashton Kutcher, blogs create a Web-linked culture that frequently acts like the cool clique in high school. When the blogosphere?as bloggers call their domain?beats the drums, it can resound through the culture. Everybody starts talking about what the cool kids are saying. Since about every blog I've looked at recently has used snarky?means witty, cheeky, though more often is used to mean snotty?the word has taken on a new life.
These days blogs are banging big drums. If not for bloggers, the Jayson Blair scandal at The New York Times might have blown over, and Executive Editor Howell Raines might still be in power. Bloggers have the freedom to examine whatever issues they want ad nauseam, and with Blair and the Times they sure did, examining every correction, every twist in the breeze right up until Howell left the building.
Around the same time in May that Jayson Blair was being investigated by his New York Times employers for making stuff up, L.A. journalist Mickey Kaus got something wrong. Blair did it intentionally, while in Kaus's Kausfiles (a blog that can be found directly or on Slate.com), he just made a mundane little mistake. It was an honest mistake, having to do with The West Wing . Blair's nontruths went straight into the national paper of record and now live on in databases, Web sites, and libraries. Kaus received an e-mail about his error a half hour after it was posted. He pulled the mistake and?poof?it was as if it had never happened.
"You have to discipline yourself to go off half-cocked," Kaus says. "If you're a regular reporter"?the kind Blair purported to be?"you say, 'I don't have enough to publish, I have to make five more calls, I have to nail this fact down. . . .' I have to say, 'No, I have enough.' You can just say, 'I'm not sure about this,' and send it off, and then you'll find out in your current e-mail what the truth is, and then you can update it."
Do it right, he adds, and you never even have to say you got it wrong in the first place.
"It seems irresponsible at first," Kaus continues, "because it's not what you're trained to do in a world where you're printing something and it's going to stay up forever in every library in the world. You have to adjust to this temporary medium where things can be corrected immediately?you can be more tentative and have more back and forth."
If getting at the truth is what reporters are supposed to do, then maybe Kaus's way is quicker than?well, quicker than anybody's who's not Jayson Blair. A newspaper reporter has to flag down sources and try to get them to talk?a stonewalling contact can hold a piece up for weeks. But Kaus puts something up on Kausfiles, says he thinks it's so and would his readers please tell him if it ain't, and his readers?who include journalists and many a source who doesn't return print reporters' calls?e-mail in their information.
Kaus's reputation rests on skewering received wisdom and those who receive it. His cachet comes from being a liberal willing to attack liberals. He should be writing for The New York Times; of course, he's barbecuing it. He was born and raised on the Westside?one of the country's liberal staging zones, so of course he's tweaking his neighbors.
The Westside is one of those places where two liberals pull up to a light and start talking politics. One day syndicated columnist Matt Miller was driving around Pacific Palisades when he pulled alongside Kaus at a red light. Miller's political talk show, Left, Right & Center, had just aired on KCRW, and as Kaus caught Miller's attention, he rolled down the window and shouted out, "You're wrong about The New York Times, they are truly liberal!" Even when he's behind the wheel, Kaus pontificates in real time.
BLOGS HAVE BEEN AROUND for years as real-time tip sheets and fanzines, but they came into their own post September 11. At their best they feature lively writing and social barometrics (trucker hats are in). But the equal fact about blogs is this: Who knew most people didn't just lead lives of quiet desperation, but boring, too? There's a lot of bad writing out there, and a lot of bloggers who think that just because they don't have editors or fact checkers, they don't need editors or fact checkers.
Kaus is different?a polymath who blogs because he wants to, not because it's the only way somebody will read him. He keeps his ego in check. Chatty and self-deprecating, Kaus resists the temptation to write about himself, given there are so many other things out there worth pondering. As a friend says, "he's annoyingly smart, and he's not obnoxious. He could be a character on Curb Your Enthusiasm, but he'd never be Larry David, because he's not that irascible."
If you log on to Kausfiles , you'll see how many entries are posted at one or two in the morning. Kaus stays up in his Venice apartment waiting for the East Coast papers to hit the Web; he reads them and then starts writing. Kausfiles presents news while interpreting it?really, it presents news by interpreting it. He likes to quote A.J. Liebling's boast that he wrote faster than anybody who wrote better and wrote better than anybody who wrote faster. "As long as you're on that Liebling curve," Kaus says, "the piece can be pretty shitty as long as it's really fast. The longer you wait, the better it has to be."
Except Kaus has been good with pieces that take a long time to produce, too. He's written for The New Republic and The Washington Monthly, and his 1992 book The End of Equality was a sweeping proposal for revamping public policy and transforming the role of government. His lambasting of welfare in his book and elsewhere helped lay the groundwork for the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. If he is the rare journalist who actually has affected policy, he has also been the liberal liberals have to read?the one who most roasts their goat.
A Kausfiles entry might contain a long commentary on Iraq (he fears we're losing the peace). It might be a one-liner skewering Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. He even offers the best criticism of cool kid pop star Pete Yorn. He's an elite journalist speaking to the media elite, while appropriating the populist tone of the Web's wide-open spaces. He's hardly the most famous journalist in town, but he might just be the best at getting under people's skin. And he's definitely the snarkiest.
IMAGINE A GIANT FIREBALL hurtling top speed through space. Then imagine an unsuspecting Earth at the far end of the comet's trajectory. Light-years apart, they grow closer, closer, closer, until: oof.
If we think of the fireball as "spin," as "opinion," as "interpretation," and Earth as "news," we see how we have arrived at today: Fact and spin have collided and thrown off molten tendrils that could someday cool into new media forms.
Once, news arrived at neat intervals, with the paperboy in the morning or Wally Cronkite at night. News givers embedded their information in a narrative?a story?that helped us place the facts in context. Today the news streams nonstop, so fast nobody can dress it up in nice narrative threads. We make sense of it by plugging it into our preconceptions about how the world works. You can call these preconceptions ideology; you can call them simply all the spin we've internalized.
The steady-streaming news providers?all the bloggers and cable news networks, the talk show and game show hosts?don't have the time to cobble together the stories we don't have time to comprehend. What they do have the time for is a quick bleat of spin. Love or hate what Bill O'Reilly has to say, he's figured out a way to get information into people's households in a form that they can absorb.
The oof is getting louder. But until bloggers figure out a way to market themselves, blogs will remain the molten preserve of hobbyists, exhibitionists, and grassy knollers.
Kaus, though, has lucked out. He makes a decent living for a journalist, earning between $50,000 and $100,000 a year for writing both Kausfiles and Gearbox, a car blog Slate also carries. (Gearbox is where he sounds like an Angeleno.) And he's found something even better than an editor?he's got Bill Gates (Microsoft bankrolls Slate) in his corner. Kaus went online in 1998, writing a column called Chatterbox for Slate. He peeled the column off and cultivated a tone and pace all his own, then took the column back to Slate. Since 2002, Kausfiles has been a prominent part of Slate's success. The online magazine recently defied post-bubble expectations and in the latest quarter reported making money for the first time; when the economy picks up and advertisers come out from the foliage, they stand to turn an even higher profit. This suggests it's possible to make money with online content. Kausfiles has been a part of its growing appeal.
"He has a ruthless intellectual honesty," says Slate editor Jacob Weisberg. Kaus's deal with Slate lets him post without being edited. "We don't want to make a precedent of that," says Weisberg, "but it's important to him that he have an unmediated relationship with his readers." Slate gets about 4.5 million hits a month, says Weisberg, and Kaus has a regular readership "in the tens of thousands, if not more than that."
There's a story Kaus likes to tell about his early writing days. His father, Otto Kaus, was a California supreme court justice, a moderate Democrat appointed by Jerry Brown. Kaus was writing in the late '70s and?like many other journalists of the era?had a fine time bashing his father's colleague, Rose Bird, the California chief justice. In an ugly campaign, Bird was voted out of office.
"My father referred to me as his fascist son," Kaus chuckles.
Bashing liberals, making things a bit uncomfortable within the family?this was a pattern established early. Born in Santa Monica and raised in Beverly Hills, Kaus is a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School. Nothing there to suggest a guy fidgeting for a fight. In person Kaus is affable and game?a good dinner guest. In print, though, he's the kind of guy who never feels more at home than when he proclaims how different he is from the neighbors.
Bailing on law for journalism, Kaus wrote for The Washington Monthly in the '80s. Under editor Charlie Peters, the Monthly became one of the most influential publications in the country, fostering a contrarian school of Democrats who aggressively critiqued old modes of thinking. They were called neoliberals, playing off the cold war lefties who in the '60s U-turned and became known as neoconservatives. "Somebody once said we'd take any liberal cause and stomp on it," cackles Peters, who doesn't sound the least bit upset. A brilliant training ground, the Monthly has turned out a wealth of journalists in the last 30 years?Nicholas Lemann, James Fallows, Jonathan Alter, Joshua Micah Marshall among them.
Mostly Ivy League-educated insiders-in-waiting who channeled outsider skepticism, neoliberals had a tremendous impact on the likes of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council. A few years later Kaus built a readership writing for The New Republic, which under editor Michael Kinsley (another Peters student) spawned an everything-you-know-is-wrong journalism, a mode of both speaking from the left and interrogating many of the left's preconceptions. Kaus's D.C. dispatches made him a player, but the East Coast badly aggravated his allergies, and he moved back west in 1995 to write a novel. Then he spent $50 on software and started blogging.
There's a touch of masquerade going on here. Kaus hanging with the bloggers is a little like Eddie Vedder moving to Williamsburg and joining an underground punk band. But he hasn't changed who he is so much as he's changed how he packages his discontent. Kaus musters up some available data but leans harder on his sense of humor than he did when he wrote for The New Republic . He's had to write shorter, punchier; the wonk is now a wag. Kaus no longer looks to reeducate Democrats; he wants to tie their shoelaces together and see how hard they fall. Sometimes he tries a little too hard?like with his equivocal endorsement of the Gray Davis recall. Kaus wants to punish the governor for creating and hiding the California budget crisis. "Wouldn't it be a good thing if politicians knew there was a heavy price to pay . . . a swift midterm hammer that might crush their careers?" he asks. He tacks on the afterthought that he doesn't like the nutty system that could replace Davis with a fringe candidate elected by less than a majority of the vote. Then he giggles that maybe neoconservative columnist Jill Stewart should be the next governor. This is pandering to the cool kids?that Stewart crack hits the peanut gallery like a burlesque dancer tossing her garter. It may give the Republicans he doesn't like fresh ammunition, but these are the jokes, people! He'll be here all week.
Freud called this kind of behavior?a kind Democrats and the left have always excelled at?"the narcissism of small differences." Maybe nowhere has it been more in evidence than in Kaus's ongoing and hilarious rants about the man he calls "Crazy Bob," liberal economist Robert Kuttner. They disagreed over welfare reform, statistics were hurled at dawn, and soon Kaus was saying stuff like "Kuttner is a toady for Democratic interest groups?sorry, I mean he believes in constituency-based politics!" and gloating over the financial troubles of The American Prospect, the journal Kuttner founded.
"Mickey Kaus is to Robert Kuttner what Ahab was to the whale," says Harold Meyerson, the Prospect's editor-at-large.
"That's giving Kuttner an awful lot of credit," Kaus says.
Kuttner politely declined to comment on Kaus.
Who can blame him? You'd have to be thick-skinned or foolhardy to take Kaus on. Or you'd have to be Robert Scheer. "There's something brutal and insensitive to the whole Mickey Kaus approach," says Scheer, whose syndicated column appears in the Los Angeles Times. "The problem with Kaus is, I don't know what real-life experience he's got. He's someone wet behind the ears, who doesn't get into the streets too often to see how things play out. I think neoliberals have ruined the Democratic party. What is neoliberalism but the urge to ape neoconservatism? Why not join the other side?"
Even Peters says he worries Kaus might be going a little too far these days. There are Republicans in the House and the Senate and in the White House; some suggest it's a good time to update iconoclasm-as-usual. Kaus almost agrees. "It's what gets me up in the morning, I admit it. I like attacking Democrats more than I like attacking Republicans. Nobody needs me to toe the party line, nobody needs yet another person saying 'President Bush's tax cut is irresponsible.' It is irresponsible, and yet . . ." He ponders, fishing for a way to say the unexpected and once more tick off the liberals. "It's so indefensible not even I defend it!
"I want to say something nobody else is saying yet is also true," he adds. "Also, I don't hold out hope that the Republicans will do what I want a political party to do. If I thought the Republicans could be reformed into being a vehicle for a decent national health care system, I would concentrate my fire on the Republicans. But they are sort of hopeless, so you try to perfect the party you think has a chance of accomplishing what you want."
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