Take On the Talking Heads
Arianna on the Prowl
by Garry Wills
March 30, 2000 -- The columnist Arianna Huffington is shocked -- shocked! -- that Republican senator John McCain is supporting the Republican nominee for president. She expresses a melodramatic anguish over this entirely predictable event. To her, it is a betrayal of the reform movement to which she had anointed McCain. In order to achieve a "homecoming" in the Senate, she claims, this hero "tucked his tail between his legs" in order to "return to the warm embrace of the pack."
This tells us less about John McCain, the right-wing Republican, than about Huffington's misplaced aspirations. So eager was she to hatch a reform movement she could call her own that it never sank in with her that McCain was running for the Republican nomination, that he repeatedly said he would not accept the Reform Party bid, that his record shows he is a Republican in every way -- on guns, on quotas, on abortion, on taxes -- except two (campaign finance reform and tobacco).
Huffington says reform cannot take place in either of the two main parties. If she believes that, she should never have expected anything from McCain, who is clearly running within one of those parties. And if reform is impossible in the two parties, then getting a reform president elected would be an exercise in futility, since he could not pass laws through a Congress that is entirely dominated by the two parties.
But Huffington is not thinking about real politics. She has always been interested in symbolic politics, which for her is celebrity politics. After all, she earlier promoted Warren Beatty as a reform candidate, which should tell us everything about her judgment of political leaders -- that, and the millionaire airhead, Michael Huffington, she touted for Senate when he was her husband, and her promotion of Newt Gingrich as the savior of the Republicans in 1995.
Another columnist, E.J. Dionne, politely reminded viewers on television how Huffington has been all over the ideological map -- from left to right to the middle and back to the left. She has promoted tough love, government by private charity, millionaire candidates, campaign finance reform.
This career is satirized in a brilliant new Washington novel by James McCourt, "Delancey's Way," in which she turns up as "Anastasia Harrington," the Greek wife of a wealthy gay man (as her husband turned out to be). Ed Rollins, who worked for her husband's campaign, has described Huffington's vindictive ways -- she hired detectives to get dirt on her husband's opponent. In McCourt's novel this becomes "the instinctual internal combustion of her impressively primed hereditary Greek revenge engine," leading acquaintances to nickname her "Stasi," after the German secret police force.
McCourt, who is gay himself, sends a gay narrator to Washington in 1995 to observe the Gingrich revolution ("The Newt Deal"), which "Harrington" is championing. McCourt's character had begun her American career with "a truly stunning talent for rubbing up against the nether parts of Gotham's markdown-Eurovagrant glitterati."
So where does Huffington go now that McCain has let her down? She seems to be looking for a replay of Seattle the next time there is a meeting on world trade. Any new movement will suit her as long as she is the den mother of it.
Copyright © 2000 Universal Press Syndicate
