Steal This Book

There are lots of funny things about Arianna Huffington’s latest jeremiad, which alternates between wisecracking humor and moralistic hectoring about the decline of American politics. Among Huffington’s undeniable charms is her sharp tongue, and in this project she acknowledges the professional assistance of a couple of first-rate comedy writers. But what should provoke cackles is the author’s trendy reinvention of herself.

At some point, Huffington seems to have teleported from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other, morphing from a conservative Republican confidant of Newt Gingrich into a militant critic of big business, an advocate of the downtrodden and disenfranchised and an enemy of politics as usual. While offering no plausible narrative of this transformation--she claims to have been shocked by Gingrich’s lack of concern for the poor--she has assumed her new identity with a palpable sense of righteousness.

Of course, the syndicated columnist and ubiquitous talking head isn’t altogether unrecognizable in these pages. What remains most familiar, aside from her acute intellect, is that shrill voice of slightly overweening certitude.

Mercifully, her aims are considerably less tumultuous than the book’s title would suggest. After cataloging the myriad ills of American society, from drug dependency to campaign finance corruption to spiritual malaise, she thoughtfully provides readers with a list of self-help remedies, including a heart-healthy diet, aerobic exercise, preventive medicine, third-party activism, family volunteerism, charity, civil disobedience and, if all that should fail, writing letters to Congress. The lasting impression is less Tom Paine or Che Guevara than Helen Gurley Brown.

One rule of book reviewing is to focus on the book rather than the author, but that distinction isn’t relevant here because Huffington’s irrepressible persona elbows onto nearly every page. She seems less capable of mature reflection than the average teenager. It might have been fascinating to learn the true story behind her radical ideological shift, but that would unavoidably entail some embarrassing confessions. Instead, she seems well aware that amnesia is the most dependable quality in American political discourse.

She is, after all, the same Arianna Huffington who not so many years ago believed that Michael Huffington’s inherited millions qualified him to serve in the United States Senate. That was the Arianna who oversaw the poll-driven, ferociously negative, rather creepy campaign that established a new record for spending and failed anyway.

The revolutionary new Arianna alludes to that unhappy episode only briefly in the preface, claiming that “the closer I got to the workings of the American political system, especially through Michael’s 1994 campaign for the Senate, the more aghast I became.” This isn’t how Ed Rollins, the top-dollar consultant she hired to run the ’94 campaign, remembers her. According to his memoir, “Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms,” she constantly insisted that her husband spend more and more money, which Rollins didn’t mind; what did bother him, however, was his accidental discovery that she had hired a detective to investigate a prominent magazine journalist who was preparing a story about the Huffingtons.

Without any hint of self-consciousness, Huffington scolds the news media. “Americans must be aware by now that the big questions facing the nation have nothing to do with politicians’ sex lives,” she writes. “But expecting restraint from the ratings-obsessed media is foolhardy.” All too true, but this deplorable trend didn’t appear to trouble her when she took to the airwaves night after night to join in the media orgy of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

In fact, she ran into trouble a couple of years ago for publishing rumors of an affair between President Clinton and the wife of a wealthy contributor. The story came from anonymous sources, was almost certainly untrue and had no real bearing on any matter of public consequence. “We must make false speech costly speech,” urges Huffington. Let’s hope she follows her own pious advice from now on.

We can also hope that the country begins to heed at least some of the reform proposals that she cobbles together from various sources. That same keen sense of the zeitgeist that once attracted her to the Gingrich “revolution” now quite accurately detects the severe alienation of citizens from their government and the political process. If that is hardly an original insight, the problems of a decaying democracy have lost none of their urgency. It is possible to endorse Huffington’s zeal while wondering about her motives.

Which brings us back to the nagging question that lurks between the lines of her little book. Is this a profound conversion or just another protean phase in the life of an ambitious climber?

Such refurbishings of public image are often the prelude to a political campaign. Rollins wrote, perhaps prophetically, that while running the “bizarre and chaotic” Huffington-for-Senate campaign, “I soon realized that I was trying to manage two candidates--and the truth of the matter is she truly was the better one. She’s very bright, incredibly fast on her feet, a good people person and a tremendous debater.”

So the real meaning of this manifesto, with its fashionable condemnation of both major parties and most elected officials, may be that the better candidate of the two Huffingtons is at long last contemplating her own electoral prospects. She could be California’s answer to Jesse Ventura, especially if everyone remembers to forget about the past.