The Return of Phil: 'The pretend thinking man's pretend thinking man' - talk show host Phil Donahue

National Review, May 6, 2002 by Rob Long

'Have your second cup of coffee with Phil Donahue."

That was the advertising slogan of the old Donahue show, back when he was a humble Chicago morning-talk-show host, back when the whole idea of a "talk show" on morning television was novel and slightly naughty.

You see, as everyone in that very different mid-1970s America would have understood, you had your first cup of coffee racing around the kitchen getting kids off to school and your husband off to work. Have a nice day, kiss kiss, here's your lunch, don't forget to pick up my suit from the cleaners, I won't honey, bye, kiss kiss, clean up the breakfast dishes, pour yourself a second cup of coffee, sit down with Phil who's interviewing a homosexual teen and his mother, sort laundry, vacuum, get suit at dry cleaners, start dinner.

It must have been weird to be a husband in those days, coming home in the evening to a couple of kids fresh from a schoolday spent learning to denounce Huckleberry Finn from their English teacher, and the free market from their history teacher; and to a wife who'd somehow, some way, somewhere between breakfast and the dry cleaner acquired a tolerant, curious attitude toward transvestite priests and feminist political tracts. Poor dad. Mouths full of food bought with the money he had made by meeting impossibly high sales targets set by a terrifying boss, his family could linger at the dinner table talking about things like sexually transmitted diseases, solar-powered cars, corporate greed, America's genocidal war against the Native Americans, male strippers, the Equal Rights Amendment, things he and the guys at work simply did not discuss. And it must have been strange to suddenly realize that it wasn't just the kids who spouted this crap -- hell, they're kids, they're taught by women in peasant skirts and men in beards (and sometimes, he was pretty sure, the other way around, too), they're supposed to be full of it, but where did his wife pick up this . . . this . . . this attitude? Where'd she get all this stuff about nuclear power and couples who swing?

But all of that was, as the kids say, "back in the day," when stay-at- home moms followed a pretty predictable daily pattern and cut across all economic groups. This morning, the vast middle-class female audience that used to tune into Phil's show is probably having their second cup of coffee in the break room at the data-processing facility of a large pharmaceutical company. And the stay-at-home moms might be more moved by a slogan asking them to "have your second iced decaf non- fat latte with your Mommy and Me facilitator." The lurid topics of the Donahue show seem pretty quaint these days, what with Monica Lewinsky's dress and pedophile priests and the ladies on The View, so it was a curiously retro decision on the part of the troubled, faltering MSNBC cable news channel to sign up Phil Donahue for a new talk show.

It's a hugely different landscape from the one Phil enjoyed in the olden days. For one thing, he no longer has the lecture hall to himself. He can't run another sneaky left-wing social-studies class all alone. Instead, he's joined a faculty of talkers and screamers, of oddball righties and loony lefties. At the University of American Television Discourse, Phil's going to have to fight for every breath. Say hello to your colleagues, Phil. Say hello to Greta, Bill, Hannity & Colmes, Alan Keyes, Larry King, Paula, Shepard, Aaron, Wolf, Judy, Chris Matthews, and Larry Kudlow & Jim Cramer. Bid a "basic cable" greeting to Brian Williams and Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala and whoever is hosting CNN's TalkBack Live this week. And don't get me started on Lou Dobbs, Neil Cavuto, and Judith Regan. There's not a lot of oxygen left in the room.

Things may have changed, but Phil remains deeply and unchangeably Phil. Appearing on television recently to announce his new MSNBC contract, he was still working the same act. Phil always looks pained, like he's thinking really hard about a question before answering it. And when he answers it, he gets a squinched-up this-is-hard-for-me-to-say look, right before delivering the answer you knew all along he would, one that mentions "alternative sources of energy" or "corporate ownership of our government" or "the so-called Christian Right." He's playing a version of the disillusioned Boy Scout, the former altar boy, the reformed middle-class conservative who has suddenly loosened up a bit and learned to accept lesbian couples raising test-tube babies. He's the pretend thinking man's pretend thinking man. It's the same act he had all those years ago, in Chicago. "I'm just like your husband, ladies," he appeared to ooze to his audience, "if he wasn't such an uptight stress case."

His direct time-slot competition is the astonishingly successful Bill O'Reilly, the bulldog host of The O'Reilly Factor on the astonishingly successful Fox News Channel. The big-ticket bout of O'Reilly vs. Donahue is rich with cultural meaning. In the first place, O'Reilly has a pretty solid act of his own. He, too, plays the former Boy Scout, altar boy, and middle-class conservative. But he's a distinctly unreformed one. He's a barker and a pointer, and he doesn't pretend to be thinking hard about a question to which he already has an answer, and he doesn't bother looking pained to say what he thinks. "I'm just like your husband, ladies," O'Reilly grins to his audience, "if he wasn't such a wuss."