In Political Pariahs, Joe Klein says of the DLC
It is curious and noteworthy that the most powerful moderate organization in either party has become a pariah. In a way, this is just the latest edition of the fight between Northern liberals and Southern moderates that has befuddled the Democrats since... well, since Ted Kennedy challenged the incumbent President, Jimmy Carter, in 1980. But it's also a consequence of the smug ideological xenophobia that currently afflicts activists in both parties—although, in fairness, the Democrats are playing catch-up to the wing-nut avidity cultivated by Karl Rove as a conscious governing strategy in the Republican Party. The Republicans don't even have a DLC equivalent.
Joe's error is in thinking the DLC is a moderate organization. As he says, the Republicans went over the event horizon long ago...and the DLC held essentially Republican positions. That would put then right on the edge as Conservatives...as professed liberals and progressives that makes them absurd.
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Southern Moderates
My idea of an acceptable southern moderate was Harold Ford, Jr. at least until he went completely over to the Dark Side. Joe Klein's idea of an acceptable southern moderate is somebody who shares his views since what he writes about and supports is indistinguishable from what most white southern moderates - Democrats and Republicans - believe.
Glenn Greenwald on Joe Klein
Check out Glenn Greenwald's analysis of Joe Klein's actual, as opposed to imagined, role in reporting and analyzing the news.
The frequent mention of Joe
The frequent mention of Joe Klein's punditry on this site has led me to reread bits and pieces of W.A. Swanberg's biography of Henry Luce, Luce and His Empire. Luce was legendary for enforcing a system of editorializing that relied heavily on well-placed adjectives to elevate his own opinions and assessment of various facts into his own form of "truth." Greenwald's criticism of how Klein methodically applies the "serious" adjective to distinguish himself and the beltway elite from the hoi polloi is very reminiscent of Swansberg's take on how Luce's publications implanted their own form of bias and propaganda into the minds of their readers without them even knowing it.
In assessing Time Magazine and the society in which it emerged, Swanberg wrote, "From the beginning there was no one in the shop with a tiresome sense of responsibility towards the news as something untouchable, something to be passed along to the reader unchanged in its fundamentals. On the contrary, the whole Time idea was change of approach and change of style, which quickly led to change of substance.... Seizing and running off with an old Pulitzer maxim that people in the news should be more than mere names, [editors] began draping them with jazz-age versions of the Homeric epithets... learned in Greek [class]. People in Time became gray-thatched, gentle-spirited or beetle-browed, and as [editors] grew bolder they became pot-bellied, tough-talking, snaggle-toothed, sour visaged or bag-jowled.... [They] were not permitted to walk. They dashed, shuffled, ambled, pussyfooted, sashayed, lumbered or lurched. Various combinations of these adjectives and verbs could be used to give an attractive or unlovely coloration and supply the reader with extra drama or amusement. A trim-figured. keen-brained politician who strode in and unfolded his policies had no complaint against Time. But a flabby-chinned, grimlet-eyed candidate who shambled and snarled was apt to lose votes, while a temperament-ridden, firmly-corseted prima donna who minced and simpered would have to be in good voice to retrieve fame."
Swanberg holds his harshest criticism of Luce for the way his magazine's anti-Communist propaganda mislead the public on the nature of our involvement in the Vietnam War, much as Greenwald reports that Klein has mislead his readers on the nature of our involvement in Iraq and even his own complicity in supporting it, while maintaining that he has been against it. Klein also supplies this same technique of applying unflattering adjectives to denounce those who don't conform to the version of reality put forth by consolidated media outlets.