Days after leaked e-mails from the liberal listserv JournoList compelled Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel to resign, he joined National Review Online for a far-ranging discussion — on his elusive politics, conspiracy theories, his true thoughts on the Tea Party, and whether he really wanted Obamacare to pass, among other topics.
DANIEL FOSTER: Do you know who leaked your e-mails from the JournoList? Do you have your suspicions?
DAVID WEIGEL: Well, I can rule out a bunch of people on the list. It’s reported that the list is about 400 people, but really 100 or so contributed to discussions and the rest are what were called lurkers. And it became more lurky after the first leaked e-mails from Mickey Kaus [who, in March 2009, leaked a JournoList thread about The New Republic’s editor-in-chief Marty Peretz]. I only want to know because it’s somebody in journalism or at a think tank that I know I can never talk to again.
FOSTER: Do you wonder about motives? Was it professional rivalry? Perhaps someone you had a relationship with and there was animosity there?
WEIGEL: I don’t know anybody on the list that fits that description. I’m pretty blunt and caustic (though I’m trying to become less so), and I would call people out a lot. But the level of digging into those things is so heavy and malicious, that it’s hard to imagine somebody who got on the list that would do that. Originally I thought it was somebody who just sent the first e-mail I wrote about Matt Drudge.
FOSTER: But after the Daily Caller piece . . .
WEIGEL: Yeah, that required someone searching the archives for my name and for a bunch of phrases.
The list was not really heterodox, there were people who were not liberals, but there were no real conservatives, and not really people who carried grudges. I’ve never really beaten anybody for a job that they were up for. Sometimes I would beat somebody for an interview. But, no, I can’t really figure that out.
FOSTER: Do you think Ezra Klein did the right thing in shutting down the list?
WEIGEL: Oh, yeah. There is somebody who knows a lot of these people, who is using it to attack people who probably thought they were friends. If you step aside from all the ideology, unless you think we have a fundamental right to all of this off-the-record information, then he did the right thing. I don’t know if there will be a new list. Probably not, actually. By the end, people got super paranoid about even talking about its existence. That’s probably silly.
FOSTER: You’ve discussed this before, but to what extent were you catering your comments to your audience in those e-mails.
WEIGEL: I definitely was. I catered to people who were liberal. I was just talking to a congressional candidate — Rick Barber, the “gather your armies” guy. I was just talking to him, and I was not misrepresenting myself, but I was kind of going back and forth about how he was being made fun of by Keith Olbermann.
FOSTER: To establish a rapport.
WEIGEL: Yes, and sometimes it was as simple as me telling liberals, ‘no, this is stupid. This is what you need to do.’
It’s as if, when you tell Democrats what they’re doing wrong, then you are colluding with Democrats. But an important point to make about this is that it was just a bunch of reporters. I do analysis. When I talk to liberals I tell them “this is what you should do.” When I talk to conservatives I tell them “this is what you should do.”
FOSTER: One of the leaked e-mails is about the special election in Massachusetts, where you suggest that the Democrats shouldn’t let their health-care reform efforts be derailed by Martha Coakley’s missteps and Scott Brown’s victory. It’s easy to construe that as you showing support for the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Do you like that bill?
WEIGEL: Does anybody like the bill? I’ve got a weakness for horserace stuff, so the more interesting story to me was the Democrats finding a way to get out from under the steamroller. I was more interested in this dramatic story of the passage. That’s a flaw in itself, I know. It’s horserace reporting.
It’s not a good bill. This came across as me rooting for Democrats, but none of the Democrats I wrote about were going to be on my ballot, so it was more like — here was me talking to liberals about how wimpy Democrats are.
I did think it was silly that if you lose one special election than you’re not allowed to do this bill anymore. It was like in 2005, some poll goes down and George W. Bush is supposed to abandon Social Security? I don’t like stupid politics. It might turn out that the smart politics would have been to just not pass the health-care bill because people didn’t want it. But I just thought that if Democrats thought they were going to duck out of this by abandoning health-care, they were wrong. Just like if Republicans thought they were going to duck out of it in 2005 by abandoning Social Security privatization they were wrong. No, you can’t go into the trenches and then just not charge the field.
FOSTER: Well, what are your politics? You’ve said in print that you’ve been through a number of political phases. How do you narrate that evolution?
WEIGEL: If you got back and read Brink Lindsey’s “liberal-tarians” article The New Republic — I think it was in 2006 — then you kind of get a sense that during the Bush presidency libertarians of all stripes were allied with conservatives of many stripes at being really irritated by what the Republicans were up to. Now, with Republicans in opposition, I am pretty happy. Though I don’t think earmark reform is that important, I’m pretty happy with how everybody got on board with that really quickly. I wrote about the YouCut thing pretty positively.
I do think though in terms of pragmatic economics — when the stimulus was being presented, I thought a Keynesian stimulus made sense at that time. When the bailout was presented, I thought that made sense at that time. The thing was that everything collapsed around it.
FOSTER: That’s pretty un-libertarian.
WEIGEL: You know, in that instance you could either follow [Austrian economist Joseph] Schumpeter or you could follow Keynes, and I didn’t follow Schumpeter. I felt like this was not the time for “creative destruction” — that we had several extraordinary circumstances.
A lot of people said at the time, when I was at Reason, that if you even have questions about the right course of action, you’re not a real libertarian. Well, you can fill out political charts however you want, but people should be able to define their beliefs in their own terms. I know I’m not a liberal. On issue after issue I oppose the Democratic coalition.
FOSTER: But you generally support Obama.
WEIGEL: On some of the big Obama initiatives, I was like, “eww, this is awful” — but I still thought we needed to get together and do this.
It’s totally fair of people to say, “if you were a real libertarian then you wouldn’t do this.” Yes, if I was your kind of libertarian I wouldn’t. Fine. But it seemed to me that pretending that a couple of simple texts could solve the problem is not the way to go. So issue to issue, ideological fight to ideological fight, I re-examined it. And the case has been for a while, throughout the Obama presidency certainly, that nobody has a great idea how to get out of this, and I wasn’t convinced that traditional libertarian ideas were going to work.
FOSTER: Some have suggested that maybe the Washington Post thought they were hiring a conservative, or were otherwise confused about your political affiliations. Do you think that’s true?
WEIGEL: I don’t think so. I told this to Politico in a story that just ran: You can’t read my body of work and think I am a down-the-line conservative who roots for conservative causes. I support some conservative causes, others I don’t. I’m more interested in tracking the movement, and the Post is run by smart people who couldn’t possibly have believed otherwise.
FOSTER: Some of your e-mails were highly critical of elements of the Tea Party movement. Do you want to take this opportunity to give a little summation of your thoughts on the Tea Party?
WEIGEL: I think the basic motivation of the Tea Party is great. It basically is people who always believed in this stuff who never had a voice in the political system, and now do. But because I write stories and not just tributes to things I like, there have been elements of it that drive me crazy. But then again, there are elements of the Tea Party movement that drive Tea Party people crazy.
I have a zero tolerance policy for things I think are conspiracy theories, and I think this was borne out in the Van Jones thing. [Weigel argued on JournoList and elsewhere that Jones, an Obama official, should resign over his connection to 9/11 “Truthers.”] I think conspiracy theories are interesting, but if I see it affecting politics, I’m like, “this is horrible and needs to be called out.”
FOSTER: Like the Birthers.
WEIGEL: People criticize me for covering Birther stuff. Honest to God, when I started covering Birther stuff, I thought it was a quirky subculture, like Kennedy assassination obsessives. But the fact that it turned out to be this huge thing had me screaming and beating the walls.
Look, blogs are fundamentally negative mediums. Same thing with e-mail lists. You e-mailed the list because you vehemently disagreed with somebody, or because you really wanted or needed some information. Anything that you weren’t incredibly passionate about, you kind of kept to yourself. If you think, “eh, the Democrats are screwing this up, but whatever,” you didn’t send that out.
With the Van Jones thing, it really was me telling a lot of people, “You’re fools, this guy has to go.” And if you wanted to, you could say, “He’s only doing that because he thought it would be good for Obama.” No, I was just interested in litigating how this should end.
FOSTER: If you try to step outside yourself for a moment, do you think, on reflection, that you were the right guy to cover the Tea Parties?
WEIGEL: Me beating up conservatives in those e-mails, I apologize for that. I was an a**hole, basically. Quote that. It’s not the way I’d want people to treat me, so I broke a rule.
[But] if you’ve got to have somebody cover the Tea Party you could do worse than someone who’s read Atlas Shrugged and who’s read Constitution of Liberty; and who at Reason was editing articles about the Federal Reserve for years; and who knows the history of the conservative movement and its ideology.
FOSTER: What’s next for you?
WEIGEL: I’m doing a bunch of interviews, and they are more heartening than interviews I had at earlier stages in my career. I’ve done enough reporting now that I think people would know what they would get if they hired me.