New York magazine writer Charlotte Klein is really annoyed with former Biden White House Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre. What bothers Klein isn't the fact that KJP was utterly incompetent as now attested to by her former fellow White House colleagues, nor even the fact that she is obviously grifting with the launch of her new self-serving book. No, what irks Klein is the word "independent" which KJP has latched onto with her announcement that she is leaving the Democrat party.
You get an idea of just how obsessed Klein is by "independent" by the fact that she obsessively repeats that word 17 times in her Friday article, "What Is Karine Jean-Pierre Thinking?"
The "independent" worry flurries begin in the second paragraph with three shots of "independent" sent across the New York bow.
...On Wednesday, she announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party to become an independent with the launch of a book called Independent. The book’s subtitle—A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines—teases a tell-all that doubles as a political conversion story. “Jean-Pierre didn’t come to her decision to be an Independent lightly,” the publisher writes in the promotional materials for the book, which promises to take readers “through the three weeks that led to Biden’s abandoning his bid for a second term and the betrayal by the Democratic Party that led to his decision.”
A couple of paragraphs later and the "independent" word count is brought up to five as we get a clearer picture of Klein's gut fear of Democrats becoming "independent."
...But Jean-Pierre’s choice to brand herself as an independent, with a book cover that blares the word “independent” like a sandwich board, is perhaps indicative of a small but growing trend among media types who believe that there’s a market for commentators strenuously unaffiliated with either party. After all, there’s no brand in the world more toxic right now than that of the Democratic Party. And the other side isn’t doing much better, with Elon Musk this week calling for the establishment of a third party amidst his bitter break-up with Trump.
The following paragraph with two more of the dreaded I-words and we are at almost the halfway mark at eight mentions of the word Klein detests so much.
It’s a strange move considering Jean-Pierre was, for more than two years, the face of the “broken” White House she is now trying to distance herself from, accused by conservatives of covering up Biden’s deteriorating mental and physical health. “She understands that the Democratic Party’s brand is so bad that there’s some cache to being an independent right now,” one Democratic strategist told me. “But the thing is she became an independent not because of how horrified she was by people propping up the barely coherent Joe Biden, but because she thinks people were too mean to Joe Biden and pushed him out unfairly. That doesn’t make any sense.” As one wag on X put it, Jean-Pierre “really saw Jake Tapper sell 50k books and thought ‘hey I could sell a twelfth of that.’”
Klein makes a big play in the next paragraph to close in on the total with five, count 'em FIVE, "Independent" words she spits out in quick succession, turning on "media commentators flogging the independent brand" like Chuck Todd and Chris Cillizza. Those people are desperate, we hear:
Whether the audience of independents is all that big remains to be seen, especially since even self-identified independents tend to be nearly as partisan as self-identified Democrats and Republicans. “I know people are saying it’s a money grab, but if she wanted to make money, I feel like she could probably come up with something better than this,” said a former Biden official who worked with Jean-Pierre. “I don’t understand what she’s going for or what she’s trying to do. She just pissed off a lot of Democrats, and it’s not like Republicans liked her, and it’s not like the pool of independents is big enough for her to even have a loyal audience.” Or as one talent executive told me: “The people who are independent are the people who have no other options.”