When Left is Right-Rachel Maddow always thought she was an outsider. How did she become a star?

[babylonsister]

When Left is Right

Rachel Maddow always thought she was an outsider. How did she become a star?
By Julia Baird | NEWSWEEK
Published Nov 22, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Dec 1, 2008



"Can you believe that sellout, Barack Obama?" says Rachel Maddow, looking around the room. "Let's hit him from the left!" It's 1:30 p.m. on Nov. 5, and the six-foot-tall Maddow, wearing her trademark baggy 501 jeans and thick-soled sneakers, has just burst into her staff meeting in a small office at 50 Rockefeller Plaza, home of MSNBC. Her team of political junkies, mostly in their 20s and 30s, perk up, laugh and start talking about how Obama is looking at hiring former Clinton staffers. "Yes!" Maddow responds, beaming. "He's already triangulating, the bastard." It's the day after the election, and Maddow has had two hours of "drunk sleep." Just a few minutes before, her intense executive producer, Bill Wolff, was giving the staff a pep talk, and a warning: don't get too cynical too soon. They may be feeling "tired and cranky" because they were up late working and drinking, but "the country is still aglow," he says. "Holy s–––, Barack Obama is president of the United States. People are almost universally feeling quite proud and quite moved by it and I don't think we want to be too fast to speed away from that." When Maddow arrives, she energizes the room. She flops to the floor, alternately lying on her back, throwing a small foam basketball in the air and kneeling to scribble in a notebook. Her ideas are all tough-minded: Who will be in the new cabinet? Who are the Republican bosses now? How will Bush handle his "lameduckitude"?

But Maddow's Obama joke prompts an interesting question: how does a liberal, left-leaning "Rachel Maddow Show" behave when a left-leaning president is elected? Her extraordinarily quick success has been due at least in part to the fervor and passion this presidential campaign inspired. Since the show debuted on Sept. 8, she has more than doubled the ratings of her predecessor, Dan Abrams, with 1.9 million average total viewers, and she's beaten CNN's Larry King 27 out of 44 nights among viewers 25 to 54.

All the ensuing hype and excitement about Maddow's rapid rise, and her quirks—the smart, self-described "butch dyke" who somehow broke into the cable-news boys' club—has masked the true reason for her success. It's not despite her differences from other talking heads, but because of them. A funny, cerebral and likable young woman who reads graphic novels and hungers for political change is more representative of the times than the older, angrier male pundits who've dominated the debate for so long. Maddow is not angry—her fans find her adorable, often confessing to crushes on her—but she is anxious, driven and determined. She did not stumble into a boys' club. She elbowed her way in, smiling.

Maddow seems to have genuinely charmed younger viewers, a Twitter-savvy, podcasting generation that has hankered for someone more like them and delights in her use of "duh," her obvious intelligence and authenticity, and her ability to be both idealistic and skeptical about politics. She eschews vanity and insists she won't stop dressing "like a 13-year-old boy" when she can.

Maddow shrugs off any suggestion that her show will grow stale once Obama is sworn in. There's plenty of news to report—and America still has a president, albeit a different one, to keep accountable. While she is intensely patriotic, she is not starry-eyed about politicians. The first time she interviewed Obama, she found him "monotone, literally and figuratively," she said, but added that when you're a "policy guy, sometimes you give people more detail than they want." She "misted up" when he won, but claims she would have done the same if McCain had: "I get moved by momentous occasions." But Maddow says she has grown up in a generation that has no idols. When her mother, Elaine, was pregnant with Maddow, she whiled away hours in front of the Watergate hearings on TV. "If you're 35, you don't have heroes," Maddow says. "Watergate and Vietnam sort of killed heroism. I'm a 30-something idealist. But … ultimately the basic idea is that you have to live a life worth living."

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http://www.newsweek.com/id/170385

[laststeamtrain]

1. That's a pretty fair assessment.

I like her because she puts together a good show & she's demonstrably smart. Some pundits have gone to the 'right' schools but they're not smart.

But, she's wrong about Old Overholt Rye. It makes for a very good Rye Old-fashioned.

Her success bodes well for the cable news biz.

Can we have more like her & fewer like banjo-boy Scarborough? I hope.