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

National Review, April 17, 2000 by Ramesh Ponnuru

She is not your average columnist, being smarter and more entertaining than most. She also gets more personal. House majority leader Dick Armey has an "ersatz, insipid, and duplicitous style." Bill Bennett is "intellectually dishonest." Henry Kissinger, she argues, favors a soft line on China (a position consistent with his entire career) because of his investments there. Could be she's just getting even for that crack about her wedding.

Huffington's zeal in the service of compassion is often indistinguishable from malice. A column in 1997 attacking one of Gingrich's aides slyly outed the aide as a homosexual. A year later, she wrote a column alluding to a nasty, baseless rumor about a congressman that was circulating in Washington. No other journalist would touch it. Still another column identified a woman-not one of the well-known ones-who had had an affair with President Clinton. (In her new book, by the way, Huffington decries the media's "slow-drip character assassination" and "rumor mongering.")

Her barbs at conservatives-and the controlled outrageousness of her style-won her some new fans. She started appearing on the Comedy Central network with Al Franken, the occasionally funny liberal comedian. She wrote a political satire. The Christmas cards stopped coming. The Center for Effective Compas sion fell by the wayside. As did her marriage. (Michael Huffington would later make a public announcement of his bisexuality.) Once she was divorced, she decided that her daughters should be close to their father and took her multimillion-dollar settlement back to L.A. The salon revived, this time with actors rather than congressmen in attendance.

In her most recent incarnation, Huff ington is more convinced than ever that America is becoming two nations, "a moneyed elite growing rich from globalization" and a growing underclass. (Skeptics may note that most Americ ans live in neither nation.) Politicians, in thrall to their "Big Business corporate masters," ignore poverty. Drug policy also reflects corporate power: We continue a futile war on drugs while allowing pharmaceutical giants to dope up our children. Which, she explains in her new book, causes them to shoot their classmates.

Huffington's political utterances have never been temperate or subtle. In 1995 she was hellbent on revolution. A few years later, she was comparing Rush Limbaugh to David Duke, calling on Republicans to repudiate the former as they had the latter. Limbaugh's offense was criticizing a summit on volunteerism in which she was involved. As the title of her new book-"How to Overthrow the Government"-suggests, she has now gone a few steps further. Now she wants tumult for its own sake. She cheers the Seattle protesters against the World Trade Organiza tion, for example, even though she opposes protectionism.

Nor does she care who wins the presidential election. To her, both parties are the same. But beneath the surface complacency of the public, she explains, is a deep anger at this state of affairs. At a dinner party in her Brentwood home, the idea was hatched that Warren Beatty could rouse the public by running for president. He is, after all, both angry and complacent himself. Huffing ton promoted this potential candidacy in her column and on TV. Dozens of people e-mailed her asking where they could send checks to Beatty. Yes, checks to a Hollywood zillionaire.