Sensible Liberals

It’s a dry day, I’m not feeling too bad, St.Salaria has visited and we need Frontline and flea spray if I’m to avoid being eaten alive so I’m going to take advantage of these freak conditions and get some things done while I’ve got the necessary oomph and also take some pictures of houseboats if possible. That’s the trouble with this warm wet weather, perfect incubating conditions for all manner of bugs and parasites.

Speaking of which in the meantime here’s a blast from the past about another sainted personage, this time Our Lady of the Progressive Blogosphere, Arianna Stassinopolous-Huffpo.

I’m republishing it because a commenter at TBogg reminded me that it’s not only Republicans who use politics to social-climb, and not just cats that have parasites. Ironically enough it’s by Christopher Hitchens, who should know a thing or two about both.

Enter the gifted Greek
Evening Standard (London), Jul 27, 2000 by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

IF you are standing in a circle of political types, in Washington or New York or Los Angeles, and the name “Arianna” is mentioned, everybody knows at once who is meant. This saves a lot of time, because there’s no need to pronounce either of the other names under which she’s already been celebrated: Arianna Stassinopoulos, Arianna Huffington or Arianna Stassinopoulos-Huffington. (During the brief reign of the third, it was no extra trouble to throw in a Puffington as a suffix and have done with it.) She’s Huffington now.

I was at a smallish dinner at her understated but beautiful house in the Brentwood area of LA a few nights ago. Nothing special; Norman Mailer and his wife Norris Church (in honour of whose first novel the bash was given), putative Presidential candidate Warren Beatty, several columnists and the man who might be the first Hispanic mayor of Los Angeles. The next day, both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ran quite extensive accounts of the soire, emphasising the fact that there will be “Shadow Conventions” at both the Republican and Democratic gatherings this summer, and that “Arianna” has organised them, and that she’s already booked more interesting speakers than the two parties have.

How did we get here? Readers of my age will remember Arianna Stassinopoulos
from the late Sixties: arriving from nowhere like one of the daughters of Zeus, she was one of the first women to be elected president of the Cambridge Union, and followed this up by writing an against-the-grain counter-feminist hit entitled The Female Woman. She was a star of the chat-shows and the social circuit, kept company with Bernard Levin and produced biographies of Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso. Interested in “New Age” spirituality, she held evenings for an outfit calling itself “Insight” and was mocked a bit in consequence, by me among others.

The magnet of America always exerts itself on such people, and by the mid-Eighties Arianna was to be seen around New York and Washington a good deal.

She’d become more decidedly political by then and married a junior figure in the Reagan administration named Michael Huffington. A nice but slightly ineffectual chap, young Huffington had access to pots of money through his father’s Texas oil business, and Arianna was very much at his side when he ran successfully for Congress on a conservative ticket. He used his time in Congress mainly to run for the Senate in California, against the incumbent Democrat, Diane Feinstein. By this time, Arianna was a positive blur of energy. She held upscale political dinner parties in DC, at which there were prepared topics for discussion (and according to rumour, a tape-recorder of hers running under the table). She was often closeted with Newt Gingrich, the supposed conservative revolutionary who had captured Congress from the Democrats for the first time in decades.

WHILE back in the Golden State, she was standing in for her husband at public debates, writing his speeches and directing his campaign. From nowhere, he came to level pegging in the polls with Feinstein and is said to have spent almost $30 million of his own money. The joke was – and it was told seriously – that Arianna would ride him all the way to the White House.

Two things unhorsed this plan. The Huffingtons were found, in the last days of the campaign, to be employing an unregistered immigrant as a domestic servant. And Michael, well, it looked as if Michael wanted to lose. He probably did want to lose, at that. It turned out that he’d been an unhappy secret gay man all his life. Arianna divorced him amicably, retaining custody of the two lovely daughters and receiving a pretty decent settlement. Then she moved sharply to the Left.

I was not ready for this. Nobody was. Suddenly the avenging figure of Huffington was everywhere, on her own radio spot in LA and in a nationally syndicated column, denouncing conservative America’s cruelty to the poor. She started a think-tank, the Committee for Effective Compassion, which seems to have given Governor George W Bush the idea for his campaign slogan of “Compassionate Conservatism”. She wrote a book called How to Overthrow the Government, in which she denounced the corrupting role of big money in politics. To her home came all the aspiring liberals and radicals. She personally floated the short-lived but much-publicised idea of running Warren Beatty as Hollywood’s liberal answer to greed and glitz.

SHE has persuaded Senator John McCain, the most popular politician in the country and the man most Republicans wanted in the Vice- Presidential spot, to open her “Shadow Convention” in Philadelphia this weekend. When the Democrats gather in LA on 13 August, they are to be shadowed by a “rapid reaction team” to include (as I gathered when I reeled from her dinner table) Gore Vidal (Al Gore’s cousin), Warren Beatty and perhaps your humble servant.

At last, the Press will have something to write about.

Copyright 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.

Old as I am and with a history of several decades worth of reading Private Eye, It’s a matter of continued surprise to me that a woman who ascended to career socialite-ism by flitting about London’s salons on the arm of reactionary Times columnist Bernard Levin, who peddled spurious psychological group therapy (and even became a minister in its ‘church’) to the London literati and who then wrote several, allegedly partly- plagiarised books, one attacking feminism, should be so feted by the sensible American liberals.

But then I suppose they have to: if an Arianna can be in the big tent too, surely so they can they, be they movie star, trust fund baby or hedge-fund manager. Her rise to progressive prominence shows them they need have no qualms about being obscenely rich, just as long they say the right things and butter up the right people at the right time.

Here she is in 1994 arguing for the proposition that the woman’s movement as a disaster:

The main news in these agreeably contentious two hours is the emergence from the campaign closet of Mrs. Huffington, a sometime head of Cambridge Union, the debating society at Cambridge University, as a well-prepared, fast-thinking advocate, even of as murky a cause as “the spiritual dimension of life.”

She is responsible for the evening’s hottest moment, incited by her denial of credit to the women’s movement for the 19th Amendment. When Judge Burstein suggests that Mrs. Huffington is not up on American history because she did not go to school in the United States, this Greek-born, British-educated, naturalized American citizen retorts that the judge can get away with that sort of put-down of immigrants only because she is a liberal.

[My emphasis]

Bestest friends with Newtie?. Progressive, my ass.

Mrs S-H is a flip-flopper par excellence who’s always managed to take advantage of the political zeitgeist to advance her own career. I’d trust her political convictions as far as I could throw her private jet, because as soon as the Right look to be in ascendant again she’ll be bigging them uip as the best thing since sliced bread. If she is to be sainted perhaps it should be as St Arianna of the Opportune Moment.

In that respect you could say she is an epitome of the Democratic party – self-made, but not; liberal, but not, principled, but not, a parasite on the body politic.