EMINENTOES: Arianna of Brentwood
Neumayr, George
INENT0Ea GEORGE NEUMAYR Arianna of Brentwood OW DID ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, one-time conservative Republican, become a liberal?" asked the press during the California recall. Very easily: She began...
...There is not much to find...
...Arianna Huffington had charmed me out of my socks to get me to manage her husband's campaign," Rollins wrote in his memoirs...
...She ran as an "outsider," though she is safely inside the dominant elite...
...His wife is the one with the ambition, who wants to buy this Senate seat on the way to the White House...
...ART: SCOTT THIGPEN NOVEMBER 2003 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 41...
...Though she wrote a few books with pretentious titles like After Reason—two of which drew charges of plagiarism—she has always preferred celebrity to seriousness...
...As Republicans rose to congressional power in the 1990s, her liberalism conflicted with her desire to climb with them, so she revised it and turned her forensics skills toward currying favor with Newt Gingrich, whom she lionized so long as he was riding high...
...USC professor Susan Estrich deadpanned that Arianna had been recalled as a mother...
...Reporters in search of the "real Arianna" troubled themselves too much...
...True, she faced some tough competition in that category...
...Very easily: She began her public career as one...
...She served as hostess of "Saturday Night at the Mill" but only lasted for four episodes...
...he asked...
...Not all conservatives were gulled by Huffington's right-wing cocktail-circuit act and paens to moral renewal (a posture that didn't stop her from supporting Hollywood libertinism...
...Now a reliable punch line to a joke, she is associated in the public mind with attention-grabbing, power-seeking, and phoniness...
...Why didn't his opponent "re-register, as a Democrat...
...The New York Times reported somberly that the "Top Independent" had exited the race...
...She can write a book called The Fourth Instinct, which preaches a spirituality for the self-absorbed, while displaying a killer instinct...
...The book—not autobiographical—decries the tax-dodging rich...
...She had incurred steep expenses writing the book Pigs at the Trough, she explained...
...Football broadcaster Al Michaels uses her to describe zig-zagging halfbacks...
...Top independent...
...She ran against lobbyists while hiring a tobacco lobbyist as her campaign manager...
...Her oft-cited affair with London Times columnist Bernard Levin didn't begin in a library...
...They scrutinized a mind that had nothing on it save stale liberal nostrums she cobbled together at Cambridge and has been repackaging ever since...
...How did she finagle a lighter tax burden than one of her maids...
...Gary Coleman, the diminutive actor from Diff 'rent Strokes, finished close behind her with 0.2 percent of the vote...
...Huffington is too unembarrassable to notice her hypocrisies...
...She literally knocked over a stand of microphones set up for Schwarzenegger on the day he filed his run as she attempted to horn in on the photo-op...
...Huffington launched her campaign with bumptiousness that would be hard to caricature...
...She then moved to New York and ingratiated herself with America's elite, earning a reputation as the "most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus...
...He concluded that, on the subject of art, "Mrs...
...and became a minister in the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness founded by the checkered guru John-Roger...
...She condemned the recall, then joined it, condemned it while joining it, then finally left it, and wound up with less than 45,000 votes, 0.6 percent...
...Her Cambridge forensics training proved useful in misleading Republicans...
...The Greek daughter of a cigar-smoking mother and an AWOL father, described in the press as a gambler and womanizer, she has a need for attention that appears bottomless...
...Her raging populist prairie fire had been lit by a phone call from actor Warren Beatty...
...She befriended Cosmo's Helen Gurley Brown...
...The children moved out of her house and into his after their protests ("please, Mom, do not run") were completely ignored...
...She sometimes seemed "truly pathological...
...This angered her now uncloseted ex-husband enough that he almost joined the recall race himself...
...The Huffingtons were liberals masquerading as Republicans, he argued...
...The irony of her vociferous opposition to Arnold Schwarzenegger during the California recall election is that he represents the same threadbare, gimmicky liberal Republicanism that she once did...
...In the early 1970s, as president of the Cambridge Union, Huffington appeared in a debate on free market economics with William F. Buckley, Jr., and socialist John Kenneth Galbraith—on Galbraith's side...
...When not appearing on British entertainment shows, she hosted them...
...He thought better of it, but not before offering up a little opposition research on his ex...
...Always up for a publicity stunt—recall her "Strange Bedfellows" appearance with Al Franken on Politically IncorrectHuffington scurried back to California, giving her children "absent-minded embraces as she spoke on the telephone about campaign-finance reform," reported the London Telegraph...
...exercised with Barbara Walters...
...Seven hundred seventy-one dollars in federal taxes over the previous two years—that was the fair share she had shouldered from her $7-million Brentwood mansion...
...She calls, a la Hillary, for a politics of the "transcendent," but practices a politics of farce and deviousness...
...Clean campaigning is the last theme Huffingtoncould plausibly champion...
...The truth is that she always was one...
...George Neumayr is managing editor of The American Spectator...
...Naturally, the media treated her transparently unserious campaign seriously...
...She was a liberal one day, a conservative the next...
...Californians haven't found Arianna's populism very persuasive...
...But in a few short months, I'd come to realize that she was the most ruthless, unscrupulous, and ambitious person I'd met in 30 years in national politics...
...She called for the closing of tax loopholes even as it came out that she hadn't closed her own...
...Before exiting the recall race, she put in a performance at the televised September debate that would have made Galbraith proud...
...In a review of her Picasso-bashing biography, the New Criterion's Hilton Kramer dismissed her as a lightweight who had written a book that was mini-series material...
...As a comically scheming puppetmaster to her hapless ex-husband, she bought a congressional seat that the duo had no intention of keeping (thus eliminating from politics the constituent-devoted Reaganite Bob Lagomarsino), then tried to buy a Senate seat...
...After Cambridge, Huffington waded into celebrity culture, on both sides of the pond...
...The gig was up when viewers complained to the sta40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2003 tion about her undecipherable Greek accent...
...She called for campaign finance reform, then threw her support to the most prodigious shake-down artist in the history of the state...
...William Dannemeyer, after debating Arianna Huffington in her husband Michael's stead during the 1994 California Senate primary, also sized her up as a faker...
...At the Union, she learned to argue both sides of a position...
...She can unleash detectives on her foes while writing of "the cry of the soul for meaning and purpose...
...He told the press, "I'm running against a missing person...
...The latter was a $30-million lark that included hiring detectives to track down a Guatemalan maid and dig up dirt on Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth, according to Michael Huffington's campaign manager, Ed Rollins...
...Huffington clearly knows nothing...
...All of the flip-flopping and flakiness characteristic GEORGE A A of Huffington's career was on concentrated display in the California recall race...
...The author of How to Overthrow the Government ended her populist run by telling the hoi polloi not to overthrow Gray Davis's...
...The media assumed Huffington suddenly became a liberal flake...
...dated Mort Zuckerman, Jerry Brown and est guru Werner Erhard...
...He rang Huffington about the recall, recounted notorious celebrity journalist Tina Brown, who was vacationing with Huffington in Ireland at the time...
...they met on a game show...
Vol. 36 • November 2003 • No. 6
