Kimberley Strassel is a member of the Wall Street Journal Editorial board, and has written the Potomac Watch Column there since 2007. She’s a graduate from Princeton University, and started her work at the Wall Street Journal in 1999.
How did you shift into journalism?
When I was at Princeton, I got an after-school job watching the kids of a local couple. They worked for Dow Jones or the Wall Street Journal, and advised me to take a year out, since I was thinking of law school, just to try something before doing three more years of school. They knew I had written for a publication at Princeton. I got a lowly position at the Journal, and then I never left. I was there as a news assistant, then a reporter after a while, and then I asked to move over to the editorial page, which I’d long been interested in.
Is going to D.C. really worth it?
Absolutely. I’m in editorial writing because you want to effect positive change. It’s easy to look at D.C. and be dispirited and feel a spirit of cynicism. Many Americans do. But that’s not going to change if we’re disconnected from it. Someone has to go and try to make it a better place, and the editorial page of the Journal tries to do that every day. There’s no reason why you have to be co-opted into Washington. I live an hour outside of the city, so that I have some distance from the town. The best advice I ever got before going to Washington was from my boss, who said, “You know, imagine that you are visiting another planet. Look at the people down there as though they’re an alien species. Observe them and report back on what they’re doing.” I do a lot of that in my column. A lot of the columns also tend to advise the alien species on what would be good for them.
Do you think young journalists should start in news, so they have the experience of news before moving to editorial work, or do you think they can start immediately on the editorial page?
I think it is a huge benefit to work in news in some capacity for a time, if you can. If it’s a school newspaper, a county newspaper, or the news side of a bigger paper, you need all the skills that you use in news. At the Journal, there is a strong tradition of reporting and reported editorials. I think if you came with no experience, you could certainly get it at the Journal. What I do fear is that there are a lot of organizations, especially that do editorials, where you don’t always have that strong journalistic background. You need that in the editorial world. Effective editorials are based on facts and arguments and you do that by picking up the telephone. It’s all the more important in a world of fast-paced news, because anyone can fashion themselves an editorial writer. Anyone with a computer can say, “Here’s my opinion on this. Here’s what someone should do.” We’re losing, to some degree, in this world of all of those opinions, some of the skills of a reported editorial and a fact-based editorial.
As a woman, has it been difficult to juggle being a wife and a mother and having a career and being successful? Would you say that it’s worth it to try?
It’s totally worth it if that’s what you want to try. I get kind of bored with all these conversations about what women should or shouldn’t do. Do what you really want to do. Now, if you want a career, and you’re worried that you can’t do that, and if you worry that you can’t do that and be a good mom, that’s not true. You absolutely can. I love my job. I love being a mom. It isn’t easy. It’s like having two full-time jobs. Some people thrive on that. I do. I like the juggling editorial writing and talking to senators with kids, homework, and doctors. It’s a busy life. You shouldn’t think you’ll get eight hours of sleep every night, but you can do it. I think that’s what women fear the most. If I’m going to be a good mom, can I focus on my career? If I’m going to have a career, can I be a good mom? You can absolutely do both.
What’s your talk going to be on next week?
We are going to talk about what we can expect for the rest of Obama’s time in office. What some of the latest mayhem, the budget fights and the faulty rollout of Obamacare means, and what his legacy might be. We’ll talk about elections next year, and where things might be going in the next couple of years.
Do you think that the Obamacare rollout will actually affect Obama’s legacy, or will we all forget about it?
A lot of that depends on if they can fix this, and there are a lot of varying judgments on that. Some people think that this is something that can be fixed. Jeffrey Zients, who was brought in to fix this thinks that this will be done by the end of November. Some think it will be in the back sights just because the website is flawed, so we don’t know yet. What I think is going to be the more interesting dynamic in the coming months is that Obama’s not running for re-election, but Democrats are. There’s a fundamental divergence of interests in their party. The White House wants everyone to stick with the program, stick with the timeline, get it done, get this sucker going, roll the jalopy down the road, but a lot of Democrats up for re-election are increasingly worried about the dire public opinion polls and are getting the blowback for the faulty rollout. Just in the past week, 10 Senate Democrats up for re-election are now suggesting there should be a delay of some form. Now the White House’s bigger problem is its own party being divided, and that will play in hugely to his legacy: whether his own party gets on board with rolling this thing out.
