POLITICS: Oh, Arianna! The progress of a political diva - Arianna Huffington

National Review, April 17, 2000 by Ramesh Ponnuru

ONE might expect that Arianna Huffington would be happy. As a columnist and media personality, she has spent five years telling politicians, especially Republicans, to make compassion their guiding ethic. Now the Republican presidential nominee is someone who believes as she does about the importance of government assistance to the volunteer groups, often religious, that tend to the poor. More recently, Huffington has been an enthusiast for campaign-finance reform; and that issue has dominated the presidential race as much as any issue has.

Yet Huffington is far from happy. Her new book, How to Overthrow the Government, is a catalogue of complaints, a prolonged howl of indignation. It is also a chronicle of how that indignation led her from being a conservative hanger-on to Newt Gingrich to being a publicist for Warren Beatty's political career. It is, more prosaically, a bunch of her columns stitched together, which often makes the book sound like a rambling monologue by Ross Perot's crazy aunt.

Huffington's verbal missiles are not precision targeted. She is hostile to the pharmaceutical industry. The media. Rich people who donate to museums and universities instead of to the poor. Politicians who follow the polls. And politicians who ignore "the will of the people" and instead pander to special interests.

She rails against negative campaigns and political consultants. She takes offense at the phoniness of fundraising letters. She calls political endorsements a "time-honored campaign con game" that "only adds to our sense that politics in America has degenerated into a world where there's no integrity, no principles, and no truth." She scorns politicians who talk about prosperity-"The P-word," she calls it. It's materialistic, you see. Such politicians see their task as nothing more exalted than "keeping inflation low for Wall Street titans." Inflation, apparently, is good for poor people. Not that anybody cares about them under our present campaign-finance arrangements: "Money speaks louder than the muffled cries of the poor." But Huffington, for one, hears their cries-perhaps when they're serving her guests dinner.

She has been many things in her 49 years, but one thing she has always been is upwardly mobile. (She's been dubbed the Edmund Hillary of social climbers.) Born in Athens, Arianna Stassinopoulos was educated in England, where her debating skills earned her the presidency of the Cambridge Union. She first attracted the attention of a wider public at age 23, when she wrote one of the earliest antifeminist books. For several years thereafter, she made the rounds in London, attached to the prominent journalist Bernard Levin. During this period, she became a minister in the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Aware ness (MSIA-pronounced "messiah"). Spirituality has been a recurring subject of her writing. Her 1994 book The Fourth Instinct: The Call of the Soul includes a description of an out-of-body experience she had.

In the Eighties, Stassinopoulos left London for New York and then Los Angeles. She seems to have spent much of the decade at dinner parties, where her flowing red hair, exotic accent, quick wit, ingratiating charm, and famous paramours made her a star. She also found the time to write three books. They made a splash, partly because she was accused of plagiarizing large chunks of them.

When she married oil scion Michael Huffington in 1986, her wedding dress cost more than most college grads' starting salaries; the reception was a P-word affair that cost upwards of a hundred grand. It's traditional in Huffington profiles to quote Henry Kissinger: The reception, he said, had everything but "an Aztec sacrificial fire dance." Barbara Walters was a bridesmaid.

In 1992, Michael Huffington ran for Congress as a moderate Republican, knocking off the conservative incumbent through sheer force of money. He was no sooner elected than he started running for the Senate against Dianne Feinstein. Huffington spent $30 million, still the record, but lost. (In her new book, dedicated to campaign-finance reform, the first reference to this race occurs on page 101; also the last.) It was a bruising race. The Huffingtons had terrible press: She was depicted as a power-hungry cultist, he as her puppet. They seemed unusually blessed with the sort of anonymous "friends" who would describe them as such to reporters.

She sprang back quickly, setting up a conservative salon in Washington. While Michael stayed in California, she lent glamour to the short-lived Repub lican revolution of 1995. She blanketed Washington with Christmas cards featuring her little girls dolled up in creepy come-hither poses. She was a confidante of Newt Gingrich, joining others to form the Center for Effective Compassion. She even urged Gingrich to run for president as a compassionate conservative (which was an only slightly less ludicrous idea than it sounds now). But it wasn't long before Huffington, now armed with a syndicated column, turned on Gingrich. She felt deceived, she claims, when she found out that a passion for charitable tax credits was not, in fact, at the center of his being. "It was like a divorce," recalls a Gingrich ally. "Everybody had to choose up sides, and she was hostile to everyone who stayed with him." Gingrich loyalists would more than once be targets of Huffington's column.