A Day in the Life of Steve Clemons

Politico reports:

A day in the life of Steve Clemons, as witnessed on Twitter: “Off to #FormulaOne Grand Prix in#AbuDhabi w/Hani Masri, Barry Diller, Liz Cheney, USAF Gen John Jumpers, David Aaron, Diane von Furstenberg.” 

At a moment when astonishing international challenges face Washington’s often very 20th-century foreign policy world, Clemons is everywhere. He’s at the White House for a gathering of wise men on Egypt, talking about Libya on PBS’s “NewsHour,” hosting everyone from top White House staffers to Gen. David Petraeus at regular “salons.” He recently was mentioned by The New York Times as a possible White House social secretary. 

The 6-foot-5, same-sex-married son of an Air Force master sergeant is the quintessential Washington figure for the new age: a self-made, uncredentialed blogger and social butterfly, intellectual entrepreneur, name-dropper and media networker. He’s both a very new kind of Washington figure — his Washington Note cracked the foreign policy establishment open for the blogosphere back in 2004 — and a very old one, the spiritual descendant of great Washington hostesses like Pamela Harriman and the nearest thing to an inheritor of the largely dead, civil, bipartisan salon of the old foreign policy elite. 

“Steve is a really important part of the foreign policy universe, and he deserves a huge amount of credit for reordering that universe,” said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official who followed Clemons into the blogosphere. 

Clemons views his own role in terms of another industry. 

“I came out of Hollywood. You go find the script you want, you find the actors you want and you package,” he said as his GMC pickup rolled toward the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington. He also mentioned in passing his advisory role — as a Japan expert — on the 1993 film “Rising Sun.” “You can play the role of a superagent. I want to impact national security in that way.” 

Indeed, Clemons’s ubiquitous social role is coupled with a policy agenda that puts him at odds even with many of his friends. His chief causes include an end to America’s war inAfghanistan, strong U.S. and international pressure on Israel to make peace with the Palestinians and a broad opening to Cuba. And that brew of potentially polarizing policy positions has made Clemons his share of enemies or, rather, Clemons being Clemons: frenemies. 

“I consider Steve a friend, and in some ways, I admire him. He’s probably the most successful social climber in the history of Washington,” said Josh Block, the former spokesman for the pro-Israel group AIPAC. Clemons said he also considers Block a friend, despite their differences. 

Block continued, in frenemy mode: “It’s especially impressive, given that Steve is really such a generalist and doesn’t know a tremendous amount about most of these issues, and his ideas are so far out of the mainstream.”