June 27, 2012 1:20 PM ET
"So just who is Sarah Palin?"
This is Keith Olbermann talking, back in the summer of 2008, when the
Alaska governor is brand-new to the national scene and Olbermann
himself is still in the position he pioneered, as the first great
contemporary liberal television pundit, the face of MSNBC. Olbermann, in
his smart-aleck way, is introducing Palin to the national in-crowd: "A
former beauty queen and runner-up in the Miss Alaska contest, a star
point guard who earned the nickname Sarah Barracuda," he says. "A
sometimes sports reporter who wanted to work for ESPN until she
realized" – and here Olbermann starts to laugh, the condescension
becoming open – "that she would have to
move from Alaska to Bristol, Connecticut."
Television news, in 2008, is still more or less a jock's medium, and
this is the way that jocks bait transfer students, mocking them as
clueless hicks. In the final years of the Bush administration, Olbermann
has transformed liberal anger into a smirk, a feeling of superiority
over the dorks and freaks and clown who run Washington. But what makes
Olbermann's introduction of Palin arresting, in retrospect, is not his
patronizing tone, but the woman who is waiting to speak, on a
splitscreen: Rachel Maddow, a 35-year-old radio host who is about to
debut her own show on MSNBC, and who will eventually take over for
Olbermann as the face of the network.
From the start, Maddow's brand is not so much out lesbian or angry
liberal, but full-on nerd: the chunky black glasses, the flailing limbs.
She doesn't seem to care much about the question that Olbermann has
fixed on:
So just who is Sarah Palin? "We don't know very much
about Governor Palin," Maddow says, when Olbermann finally gives her a
chance to speak. "She's basically been a human-interest story in terms
of the political press in this country thus far." Then she moves on to
what really interests her: not politics as personality but politics as
mechanism, not who is winning power but what is being done with it.
Palin is being sold as a small-government conservative, the opponent
of the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, but Maddow can tell the sales job is a
fraud. "I went and looked it up in the
Anchorage Daily News
from 2006," she says, her nerd cred on full display. "Palin was asked
point-blank about funding for that bridge, and she said, 'Yes... the
window is now.'" Others in the media had noticed the flip-flop, but
Maddow has zeroed in on something else: Palin had said "the window is
now" because Alaska's congressional delegation was senior enough to push
the project by using earmarks, the backdoor maneuver that congressmen
use to enrich their districts with budget-busting boondoggles. Palin
wasn't just for the bridge, Maddow points out, she was actually for
earmarks,
the very thing she is supposed to be against. If you view politics as
Olbermann does, as a kind of absurdist theater, then this is a gaffe, a
sign of Palin's naiveté and unreadiness. If you view things as Maddow
does, then it indicates something deeper, a fissure in the base of
Republican ideology, a contradiction cracking open behind the
presumption of power.
You could feel a transition coming. "Rachel Maddow," Olbermann says,
his enthusiasm a little competitive, "whose new 9 p.m. Eastern show
premieres here a week from Monday –
tick, tick, tick..."
That Monday, Maddow beat Larry King in the ratings, a rare feat for
MSNBC, and she also beat him the first week, and the first month. Seven
weeks later, on the eve of the presidential election, Barack Obama
summoned her to Florida to interview him, and she was made. This spring,
her book on the arcane topic of the national-security state stayed at
number one for more than a month. Her show – no less partisan or liberal
than Olbermann's, but marked by less conflict and more explication,
less righteous fury and more policy wonkery – has become a prototype for
MSNBC, a new idea for how liberal anger might play on TV, and the
network has added shows by hosts who think very much like she does:
Chris Hayes, Melissa Harris-Perry. "She's a model for everyone at this
channel," says Phil Griffin, the head of MSNBC. "They look at her and,
in their own ways, they want to be like her."
Yet Maddow's success has left her feeling anguished – over the
complicated irony of being the avowed outsider, the lesbian AIDS
activist, who has become part of the establishment. Angst is such a deep
and familiar subject to her that she says the word with the original
German pronunciation –
ongst. "The outsider thing is just
dyed-in-the-wool for me," she says. "I've never been much of a joiner."
Maddow comes to Washington each year during the weekend of the White
House Correspondents Dinner. The compromise she makes between her
revulsion at the capital and her obligation to be there is to skip the
event itself, agreeing to attend the MSNBC afterparty only if she can
serve as bartender and avoid mingling with the political elite. "I told
them the only way I'll come is if I can work the party," she says. And
so here she is, at the end of April, pouring drinks across a massive
wooden bar, watching everyone get drunker and drunker, thinking to
herself as a guest commits the mixological sacrilege of ordering a vodka
martini: "Not judging. Not judging.
Judging. Judging."
Washington, that is to say, is not yet hers; its debates are not
conducted on her terms. The morning after the correspondents dinner,
with most of the capital hungover, Maddow shows up to work, as a
panelist on
Meet the Press. Appearing alongside her is Alex
Castellanos, a Republican media consultant who served both George W.
Bush and Mitt Romney, an embodiment of the clubby, insider pundit
culture that Maddow abhors. When she begins to talk about gender
disparity in pay – "Women in this country still make 77 cents on the
dollar for what men make" – the genteel Castellanos, a master of the
form, simply denies that this is true. Women in the workforce, he
insists, make just as much as men; liberals are just "manufacturing a
political crisis."
Maddow knows immediately that Castellanos is lying to the audience.
She swivels so abruptly in her chair, trying to make sense of what he is
saying, that the camera winds up fixed on a spot just behind her left
ear, as if it were an assassin's scope. You can see her, in real time,
coming to terms with the extent of the lie as she watches agreement
flicker across the face of the other Republican on the panel. "This
hasn't just been sold to Alex by someone briefing him on the subject,"
she thinks to herself. "This is something that has actually been sold to
Republicans – this is a vision of Republican World."
The tricky part is knowing what to do about the lie. Chris Matthews
would erupt in thunderous outrage; Keith Olbermann would dissolve into a
knowing sneer. But Maddow's skills are different: She strives not for
the expression of political anger but for its suppression, to distance
herself from the partisan debate rather than engage it, to steward
progressive fury into a world of certainty, of charts, graphs,
statistics, a real world that matters and that the political debate
can't corrupt. Maddow's producers say, unexpectedly, that the closest
analog for her style as a broadcaster is Glenn Beck, whose abilities as a
performer she very much admires. Though their worldviews could not be
more different, Maddow and Beck both attempt to pull off a similar
trick: to reflect and redirect their audience's rage at politics without
succumbing to it. What Maddow is trying to build is a different channel
for liberal anger, an outsider's channel, one that steers the viewer's
attention away from the theater of politics and toward the exercise of
power, which is to say toward policy. On-air, like Beck, she is almost
relentlessly cheerful. "Anger is like sugar in a cocktail," Maddow tells
me. "I'd rather have none at all than a grain too much."
But this time, apparently, she lets a grain too much show. "Rachel, I
love how passionate you are," Castellanos says, coolly pivoting the
argument from the facts to her barely contained fury.
"That's really condescending," Maddow replies.
This is Maddow's battle with television: to try to bring a different,
more objective model of inquiry to a world of political talking points.
Later that week, conferring with her staff, Maddow recounts what had
actually flickered across her mind in that instant with Castellanos. "I
wanted to say, 'Are you saying I'm cute when I'm angry?'" she recalls.
"But I didn't, because when you're a woman on television, you can't even
say the word
angry."
Each
day at 2:00, on the fourth floor of 30 Rockefeller Center, Maddow
leaves her office and the "temple of paper" she has been reading and
assembles her staff around a white board, where potential stories have
been listed. She stares at them mutely for a while, trying to discern
from the raw current of the news what is interesting to her, and to
whittle the day's events into a show.
Today they already have a winner lined up. In Michigan, the
Republican governor has appointed emergency financial managers to take
over the affairs of some of the state's most debt-ridden towns, many of
them heavily African-American. The managers, in several cases, have
turned into tyrants, selling off public assets to the private sector.
One of Maddow's producers has traveled around Michigan, and has lots of
terrific tape. ("We believe in voting!" one citizen thunders during a
town hall.) No one else is talking about Michigan, which makes it a
perfect Maddow segment, one that will give her audience a glimpse of the
secret workings of power, of a violation of rights. When it airs, it
will be the most watched segment of the day's show.
