Chris Boese's Weblog

Response to Tristan's comment about Sarah Palin

[Note: this is also posted as a comment in the thread on the previous post, but I wanted to bring it up here as well. Also, to Tristan, yes, it is a serious question, which is why I gave it a serious reply. Thank you so much for posting it.]

Tristan wrote:

I'm not trying to start a flame war here, this is a serious question.

I understand that you know her, but how can you think that she'd make a good president? She's been governor for 2 years and before that a mayor of 9,000 people. That just seems like a mistake by the republican party. I'm voting for Obama, but I just don't get how anyone can vote for McCain now seeing as he'll probably die before his term is up and the country would be left in the hands of a 44 year old who has no background in politics.

Just a quick reply:

You raise good points, and I am hoping for Sarah's sake she does all right in the debate with Biden.

But she ain't no Dan Quayle, I can tell you that. Just because she's been tucked up in Alaska (as many talented people are, hiding away up there, by choice), doesn't mean she won't study her playbook and be quick with decent replies.

Here's where I give her points: you gotta understand what it means to stand up to the oil companies in Alaska. Before she did it, it was inconceivable to me that ANY Alaskan politician could do it. These are companies who rule the world, who dictate terms, pay off whomever they want in whatever countries they want, and have corrupted Alaska politics long before I ever moved up there in 1976.

But like Oklahoma, they are the only game in town for Alaska. Without oil, the state has no economy to speak of.

So what do I give Sarah credit for? Her political resume IS as lite as Obama's, and while she's one year younger than I, Obama is one year older than I am. Obama's lite resume (community organizing? Fancy word for what Sarah was doing in Alaska in her school board and as mayor, if you ask me) includes Harvard Law, but any Alaskan resume includes the deep foundational credo: "We don't give a damn how they do things Outside" (meaning Lower 48). To my mind, that unorthodoxy, surgically implanted into your backbone, leads many supremely qualified people, multi-generational families, to essentially give the Eastern establishment the finger, and to make their religion the common sense logic of Huck Finn, who "lights out for the territory" to be able to start with a cleaner slate than any given establishment will allow. That same motivation also led a lot of Northern Europeans to settle in a so-called "New World," and legions of immigrant waves to follow in succeeding years.

But the main thing I give Sarah Palin credit for is integrity, and lord knows, the GOP needs a MASSIVE dose of that. And truly? What kind of a woman does the GOP pick? They got Elizabeth Dole, and they picked Sarah. Sexist GOP piggies THINK they got a pretty prop that they can trot out when they need her, then go off into smoke-filled rooms to take their orders from Karl Rove  and Cheney.

I mean, look at what they did to Christine Todd Whitman. Republicans favor women politicians as quiet props who keep in their place.

I bet you Frank Murkowski is STILL wishing Sarah were that kind of a woman. And I can't stop grinning, because she isn't, and she is walking into Rove's world with her eyes open and integrity in place. They are betting they can corrupt her with politics as usual. I am betting that she could take down more ethically-challenged Republicans from the INSIDE than Woodward and Bernstein ever did!

Think of it. What would Donna Haraway's "feminist cyborg guerrilla" come from, if she were set up to subvert from inside the belly of the GOP beast?

Chris

Sarah Barracuda!!!!

Link: Poynter Online - Al's Morning Meeting.

The governor has roots in local government, serving two terms on the Wasilla City Council and two terms as the mayor/manager of tiny Wasilla, Alaska, a town of 6,700 people whose average family income is $53,000.

[...]

RealClear Politics gives this background for the Alaska Governor:

When she was leading her underdog Wasilla high school basketball team to the state championship in 1982, her teammates called her "Sarah Barracuda" because of her fierce competitiveness.

Holy Crap!

Sarah Heath Palin has just been named Sen. John McCain's running mate for the highest office in the country!

I know I'm strongly backing Barack Obama now that Hillary is out, but I just HAVE to note this. I mean, it isn't every day somebody you know from high school has a chance to be a heartbeat away from the presidency of the single remaining global super-power nation (as opposed to global super-power corporations, for instance, which are more powerful than many nations).

Oh Sarah, I wish I could vote for you, but I am SO pumped that you got named for this. Wow. What an amazing life and career you are having!

Link: McCain taps Alaska Gov. Palin as vice president pick - CNN.com.

[...]

Palin, 44, is a first-term governor who unseated incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski in the Republican primary in 2006 and went on to defeat former Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat, in the general election.

She will be the first woman to be nominated for vice president as a Republican and only the second to run for vice president on a major party ticket, after Democrat Geraldine Ferraro in 1984.

Palin also will be the first Alaskan to be on the ticket for either party.

[...]

Yeah, people in Alaska woke up to a pretty big surprise today. My mom called, cuz her sister called from Wisconsin to wake her up and tell her. I was on the road, and I stop to type this in a truck stop restroom, after listening to the announcement on the radio.

I'm just trying to imagine how she'll do in the debate with Sen. Joe Biden. It's hard for me to wrap my head around. I mean, this is somebody with the same college degree as I got (journalism), whom it was my duty to guard as a point guard for many years, as cross-town rivals. And yes, she generally fouled out more than I did. I attended a basketball camp where her dad coached one summer.

I'm also pretty sure I covered at least one beauty pageant she was in, when I was a photog for the local paper in the mid-80s. That was my beat the summer of '85, and it was thrilling, let me tell you.

My mom is just freaked out that their little Wasilla mayor is up for vice president!   

McCain apparently is making a concerted effort to reach out to former supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton who may be unhappy with the choice of Sen. Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee.  Reacting to the choice of Palin, Ferraro said, "I believe that people will look back and assess how Hillary was treated by the media during the campaign primaries. And it remains to be seen whether or not the ugly head of sexism -- in the media -- will raise its head again."

[...]

Sarah is an unorthodox political original, I'll give her that. If anybody tries that sexist crap with her, she'll find a way to knock them back on their asses. I've been knocked on my ass a few times by her, and I can vouch for that.

My friends have wondered how I reconcile my enthusiasm for Sarah's political fortunes with my own politics, which are quite different from hers. I really don't have a good answer, because, from growing up in Alaska, I was never that bothered around people with political views widely divergent from my own. That's just normal up there! Nobody in Alaska marches in lockstep. If you went around breaking with people you disagreed with on X or Y, you'd have no friends left. It is a state of extremes, and that's why people go there, live there, love it there. 

I don't think McCain will be the best president, and I'm now completely on board with Obama/Biden.

When I was a kid, I dreamed about going to law school, or going into politics. In high school I applied for and desperately coveted the internship with the now-notorious Sen. Ted Stevens. Then along the way, I sort of lost my dream. It didn't come for kids like me, I was told. My dad was a construction worker, my mom an elementary teacher. I didn't get into the elite schools. I have student loans up the ass. I took classes that talked about how hard it was to break into those rare air spaces. I just figured, for me, it wasn't in the cards. I wrote it off as a door that only opens to people of great privilege.

I never dreamed I'd end up working in Arkansas as a journalist, where I met this guy, the governor, and his wife, and later taught at their school for high school gifted kids. And NEVER in a MILLION YEARS would I have guessed that I'd been running up and down the basketball court in high school with a future vice presidential candidate.

(Nor would I have guessed I'd be typing out this blog post on free wifi inside a stinky truck stop rest room in PA, the laptop balanced on top of an overflowing wastebasket! LOL!)

But Sarah, you GO GIRL! I know what theme song they'll play for you! Heart: Barracuda!

OK, so if not Hillary, I'll take Biden

Link: Obama Picks Biden, Adding Foreign Expertise to Ticket - NYTimes.com.

Link: Biden adds experience and signals tough line | Politics | Reuters.

Link: Biden brings agile mind, loose lips to ticket - International Herald Tribune.

Link: Analysis: Biden fills attack role - Yahoo! News.

OK, so as I was rooting for Hillary to get VP, and had some SERIOUS doubts about some of the NO-NAMES that were being floated as supposedly viable alternatives to Senator Clinton, Obama managed to pick the ONE PERSON I really learned to admire more than before during this primary season (I already admired Hillary, and enjoyed watching her soar).

Joe Biden had some of THE best one-liners of the primary season, not just good lines, but HE SAID the things Kucinich should have been saying, and more succinctly and directly on target. Hell, I'd love him forever just for the memorable line that basically destroyed Rudi Giuliani as a candidate (paraphrasing: that Giuliani's every other statement included three words: a noun, a verb, and 9/11).

I was absolutely certain he would be Secretary of State on ANY ticket, and I'm a little worried that he won't be running the State Dept. I hate how (BEFORE CHENEY) there is a long tradition of sticking the VP in a closet, as happened with Al Gore.

But that's what you get when the VP is a re-purposed Primary Season rival, a potential threat, as was wonderfully illustrated in The West Wing TV program (by the guy who was in Animal House, no less!). I'm not entirely certain Biden would make another run for president, but he's unorthodox enough, I would not rule it out, nor begrudge it of him. 65 is not old, but this run gives him another option for his political sunset, as finishing your career as an elder statesman confers longer usefulness and higher stature than hanging on as the most senior senior in the Senate. Just ask Ted Stevens, since Strom Thurmond is no longer around to have controversial birthdays.

Biden's experience makes me relax a bit on this ticket as only Hillary could have, because he's been around and around the block on the Foreign Relations committee, and I've WATCHED him in that role, I actually paid attention to what he was up to for a lot of that time. The pity is, he was wasted there during the Bush Administration, just as surely as Colin Powell was wasted at the State Dept. I have no reservations about the quality of Biden's advice and work in that arena, and fully expect it to be smarter than Obama all around.

Wonder who will get the State Dept then, tho? Wish you could give it to the VP. But I also feel relaxed should he have to take over the presidency in a crisis as well, because of his foreign policy experience (as I would have with Hillary as well, it goes without saying, since I wanted her for president).

He was on Judiciary too, so he also will be well-armed to help overhaul the mess that is the Justice Dept. as well. That's a job he could be given as VP: to help a new Attorney General clean house.

I'd rather see him clean house at State first, and then Justice. State isn't in as bad of shape, but the Bush Administration foreign policy positions did the damage, not rampant corruption and cronyism, as at Justice (at the behest of the White House), which has now lost all credibility as an independent office.

But the thing I MOST look forward to is Biden's mouth, on the campaign trail, as official Attack Dog, as bad cop to Obama's way-too-cool-and-boring-Kumbayah-singing cop. Yeah, I want to see somebody REALLY mix it up with the GOP, all their army of attack poodles and slanderers and Lee Atwater plumber wannabees.

There is a risk there, unleashing Biden's mouth. On domestic stuff, sometimes he gets the foot-in-mouth problem, but the reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that he tends to say what he thinks too often, without putting that creepy politician editor widget between his brain and mouth.

Who can fault a person for that?

In the land of Xena: Warrior Princess, the sheer joy was watching the New Zealand folks, and especially Lucy Lawless, interacting with the press. The US audience was SO enculturated to the PR image consultant-driven, overly-careful stars who rarely said anything that wasn't bland and forgettable. Lucy Lawless showed up, accidentally flashed her boob while singing the national anthem at a hockey game, held her head up unashamed, and would say whatever the hell she felt like saying. Now carefully ensconced in the US, Lawless acts as careful and less raw as most US celebrities, and is about as interesting, unfortunately. Back in the beginning, tho, she was a breath of fresh air.

So Biden, after all these years (and that awful plagiarism thing, long behind him, I hope), still has part of his mouth directly connected to his brain, often bypassing the talk-like-a-careful-politician governor. That's a double-edged sword, but I didn't see the downside of the double edge during the primary season as often as I expected to.

Instead I saw a happy warrior, itchy to take on these know-nothing image massagers of the GOP, ready to rhetorically call out Karl Rove et. al. and give them what for. It was a sad day when he left the primaries, and until Hillary and Obama got their danders up and quit singing Kumbayah themselves, I worried all heat and light had gone out of the primaries. 

So Biden is back, and he's got some good targets to gun for! You won't need coffee to stay up for the debates! Let's get ready to rumble!

Go Joe!

Biden brings agile mind, loose lips to ticket

The Associated Press

Saturday, August 23, 2008

WASHINGTON: Joe Biden has lived a life of second chances, a cycle that's been cruel and redemptive by turns. Now he's starting over once again.

Deeply private yet in-your-face, collegial yet ideological, the Delaware senator brings a wealth of foreign policy experience to Barack Obama's Democratic ticket, plus wisdom in the ways of Washington and an infectious enthusiasm for political donnybrooks.

He adds suspense, too, over the question of when — not if — he'll put his foot in his mouth. Biden's agile mind comes with a loose tongue that cannot always be properly restrained.

Back in his hometown of Scranton, Pa., Biden's Catholic schoolmates nicknamed him Dash because he stuttered so much his speech sounded like Morse Code. Biden overcame that rip at his confidence, smoothed his talk and doesn't seem to have quieted down since.

The strongest sign that Obama was seriously considering Biden for his running mate, despite some differences over national security, energy and more in their voting records, was Biden's odd absence from the public in recent days. Normally he's a sucker for a microphone.

And it was a sign of those Washington ways that when he told reporters, "I'm not the guy,' no one believed him, just as no one believed him when he said of the vice presidential slot last year, "I would not accept it if anyone offered it to me."

That's how people talk in politics — a different sort of telegraphing code. And after more than a third of a century in Washington, and two short-lived presidential campaigns of his own, Biden has it down pat.

He came to Washington as a wunderkind, elected to the Senate in 1972 at age 29 — the earliest possible age — and just meeting the rule that one must be 30 when sworn in. The knock against him used to be that he was more sizzle than steak, articulate but perhaps not all that deep.

At age 65, as a party elder and veteran of titanic judicial nomination struggles, world crises and legislative dealmaking, that rap has faded.

His hearings as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are historical soliloquies on the fly, complete with grace notes liberally dispensed to colleagues and witnesses of any political persuasion, humor often directed at himself and sharp-tongued fulmination over what he sees as the failures of the Bush administration.

His first presidential campaign, in 1987, was a "train wreck" by his own description, one of those times that forced him to pick up pieces and start anew.

He'd lifted lines from a British politician, exaggerated his academic achievements when boasting about his smarts to a voter who challenged him ("I have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect," Biden recalls saying) and suffered horrendous headaches that turned out to be life-threatening brain aneurisms that kept him out of the Senate for seven months.

"In the aftermath I had to remake my health, my reputation, and my career in the Senate," he writes in his memoirs. And that was not the worst of his shattering episodes — not even close.

[...]

Rachel Maddow goes prime time cable on MSNBC

Link: Maddow Gets Her Own MSNBC Show | The Trail | washingtonpost.com.

Maddow, who leavens her barbs with humor, is something of a heroine on the left. New York magazine recently ran an item headlined "Why We're Gay for Rachel Maddow," and a Nation article said:

"Maddow didn't get here by bluster and bravado but with a combination of crisp thinking and galumphing good cheer. Remarkably, this season's discovery isn't a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a Ph.D. Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist."

Congratulations Rachel!

It couldn't happen to a smarter woman, and the cable news bloviation airwaves are just a tad more intelligent when your voice cuts through the shit!

I haven't been able to get Air America in a while now, but I stuck with Keith Olbermann even as he piled on Hillary, just to catch Rachel and Pat Buchanon juicing things up with something other than the standard, tired old spin-meisters.

So Rachel, do something original! They'll probably make you salt your show with all the standard paid-for-hire talking heads (like you used to be, in your election drag, which was hot in its own way, but not like your non-drag shots--found this one at right on Facebook--hey, it works for me!).

Don't let network management types push you around too much! Standard cable programming wisdom is utter bullshit!

Here's some of my fav bits from an article in The Nation and around the web:

Link: The Nation: Rachel Maddow's Life and Career.

Mad for Rachel Maddow

By Rebecca Traister

This article appeared in the August 18, 2008 edition of The Nation.

July 30, 2008

VIRGINIA SHERWOOD/NBC NEWSWIRE VIA AP IMAGES Rachel Maddow reports from the MSNBC newsroom in New York City, January 3.

In a year bursting with memorable moments in televised political punditry, the first may have come on January 8, when MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow explained one of the quick-spreading theories behind Hillary Clinton's victory in New Hampshire, a surprise win that had knocked many of Maddow's on-air colleagues on their asses.

"You want to know who they're blaming for women voters breaking for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama?" a delighted Maddow asked co-panelist Pat Buchanan and host Chris Matthews, her eyes flashing. "They're blaming Chris Matthews! People are citing specifically Chris...not only for his own views but also as a symbol of what the mainstream media has done to Hillary Clinton."

Matthews sputtered dismissively, but Maddow wasn't done yet. "People feel the media is piling on Hillary Clinton," she said, "and they're coming to her defense with their votes."

[Happily, I was watching this particular show live, and relived this moment reading it here! But at the time I was clapping and cheering, doing my usual "Go Rachel, Go Rachel!" Guess I wasn't the only one!]

For Matthews, who'd been enjoying near rapturous pleasure over the presumptive early-season thumping of his personal hobgoblin, there could not have been worse news than that his own commentary might have paved the way for Clinton's triumph. Yet here was just this headline, delivered by Maddow, looking like Sylvester the Cat, practically licking yellow feathers from the corners of her mouth.

"I didn't mean it in a mean way at all," says Maddow over breakfast on a summer day many months and many MSNBC promotions away from that indelible January night. "But I knew that it was just going to blow his mind."

Matthews is far from the first talking head to get this treatment. Long before this primary season, clips of Maddow, an Air America host often invited on cable news shows as a ballsy gremlin of the left, zipped around the Internet. Her specialty was making Tucker Carlson's head explode, or getting under Buchanan's skin until all he could do was gibber at her about socialism. But presidential election cycles provide the hot klieg lights under which character actors mature into media leading ladies, and at 35, with fewer than five years of national broadcast experience under her belt, Rachel Maddow is the explosive star of the season.

[YES! I been saying it and saying it.]

She's gone from being a popular guest analyst on MSNBC to an exclusive commentator to a regular guest host for the network's prize pig, Countdown With Keith Olbermann. Now there is increasing clang and clamor over the possibility that she will get her own show on MSNBC.

[As of Sept 9, which Rachel notes is her 93-year-old grandmother's birthday. I'll be visiting my 95-year-old grandmother at the time. Maybe we can watch the first show together.]

What's remarkable about Maddow's ascension is not its velocity--Hurricane Katrina made Anderson Cooper in less than a week...

[For the record, I called that out here on this blog as well, and got tons of hits that week.]

--but the shifts in media it may demarcate. Maddow is one of the few left-liberal women to bust open the world of TV punditry, which has made icons of right-wing commentators like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. Unlike her beautiful, bilious conservative female counterparts or the cocksure boys-on-the-bus analysts, however, Maddow didn't get here by bluster and bravado but with a combination of crisp thinking and galumphing good cheer. Remarkably, this season's discovery isn't a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a PhD Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist.

[Yeah, and by being a hell of a lot smarter on her feet than the average bloviating bear. I wonder what her astrological sign is? I'm guessing Sagittarius, with those truth-arrows she likes to shoot with deadly accuracy.]

All of which raises a crucial question: does Maddow's unlikely success, reliant on her ability to defy cliché and categorization at every turn, signal a move in punditry away from the thuggish and the angry and toward the lucid and sophisticated? Or has her powerful charisma and canny career management allowed her to break the rules--without actually breaking a mold?

[That's the $64,000 question! On Air America, she called herself "Amy Goodman with animal sounds"]

When we meet, Maddow is halfway through an eight-night stand filling in for a vacationing Olbermann on Countdown, and she is vibrating with energy from the previous evening. She believes she has three distinct responsibilities when subbing: not messing anything up for the show's permanent stewards, keeping Olbermann's ratings high and just being Rachel Maddow. "Trying to do it as if I'm Keith isn't the best way to go," she explains.

Maddow fulfilled all three responsibilities in her July stint, showcasing her obvious facility with the medium while putting her own stamp on the program.

[Without trying, that week I managed to catch every program. Go figure. Not since Xena: Warrior Princess have I watched any program so faithfully. I try with Battlestar Galactica, but life too often intervenes.]

Nonetheless, she still dwells on her anxieties about the mechanics of hosting--when to look at the camera, when to turn to the script--which she says Olbermann has tutored her on. "It's like rocket science, honestly," she says. "And I feel like I've got a learning curve that's like the Matterhorn! Holy mackerel!"

Of course, Olbermann recently told the Kansas City Star that his protégée mastered the technical stuff in about ten minutes, and that on the first night she stepped in for him, she didn't make a single teleprompter mistake, while he averages four or five a night. But Maddow's signature mixture of self-deprecation and gusto, her holy mackerel-ness, is as good a place as any to start thinking about her singular success. Everything about her radiates competence and a deft, bright careerism. She wants to succeed, makes no bones about campaigning for her own television show and yet evinces a regular-person charm and self-doubt that ensures you'll never mistake her ambition for bloodthirst or bullying.

Unlike her Air America founding classmates Janeane Garofalo and Al Franken, Maddow is not a professional comedian. Still, it's clear that she finds many of the characters lumbering across the tableau of American politics a total hoot. She finds her own story pretty hilarious, too. Asked if her television career is the culmination of a plotted path, Maddow laughs. "You mean when I started working on AIDS in prisons, was this where I thought it would end up? Yeah. This is pretty much it. Phase forty-seven of my master plan."

Maddow grew up in the Bay Area; she came out just before college in 1990 and became an AIDS activist at the epicenter of the epidemic. She earned a degree in public policy from Stanford before beginning work with ACT UP and the AIDS Legal Referral Panel. But Maddow had trouble breaking into treatment activism, which was then the rock-star world of AIDS policy. "It was boys' land," she says. "I knew like two women total who were doing treatment activism. And I didn't totally get it. I'm not like Barbie--'Math is hard!'--but it was a techie world, and I didn't feel like I could be all that helpful."

What she discovered instead was the nexus of the radical prison reform movement of the '70s and modern AIDS activism. It was an area where Maddow felt progress--like allowing secure hospices to take dying prisoners--was possible. "Dying behind bars?" she says fourteen years later. "Wicked expensive. And wicked stupid. And also mean. So let's make the hospices get what they want and also do the right thing!"

In 1995 Maddow traveled as a Rhodes scholar to Oxford, where she began a doctorate in political science, focusing on the intersection of the AIDS and prison movements. She moved back to the United States to finish her dissertation, crashing with friends in Western Massachusetts. "I wanted to live somewhere where I'd be unhappy," she explains. "And I have no interest in New England, hate winter, don't like the country, not fond of animals." More than a decade later, Maddow still divides her time between her home in Northampton, Massachusetts, and an apartment in Greenwich Village, both of which she shares with her girlfriend, artist Susan Mikula. The couple have been together for almost ten years, and Maddow calls their relationship "my proudest accomplishment."

[No way I could complain that much about Northampton, for most of the obvious reasons. I'd take a teaching job at Smith in a heartbeat, but the real lure? Living a stone's throw from Emily Dickinson's grave! I happened to be working on my doctorate during this same times, and making pilgrimages to that area fairly regularly, but mostly before 1996. Sorry if I missed you, Rachel. As in, damn, I am sorry.]

After defending her dissertation, Maddow picked up work on AIDS in prison again, as well as a series of odd jobs, from cleaning buckets at a coffee bean factory to being a handyman who didn't know how to fix anything. As part of her patchwork career, she attended an open audition to replace the "news girl" at the local radio station. She got the job and took a shine to the airwaves. When Air America launched in 2004, Maddow lobbied the network to bring her aboard. It did, hiring her to co-host Unfiltered with Chuck D and Lizz Winstead. When the show was canceled a year later, Maddow got her own two-hour weekday slot. "They had no business hiring me," Maddow says of the flier Air America took on her. "As it turned out, it worked out for them. I mean, I hope it did. I hope they're happy!"

[2005 in Missoula, Montana was, oddly, when I got totally hooked on my daily Air America Rachel Maddow fix. And then, mysteriously, I couldn't find it anywhere I was living again, until she turned up on Olbermann.]

Maddow is one of the only original Air Americans to be left standing after the company's rocky four-and-a-half-year history, and her mainstream success is an unqualified victory for the network. If she got plucked away by grabby television hands, it would be a tough loss. "We view her as a homegrown talent," says Air America chairman Charles Kireker, who has run the network since February. "We hope and expect to have her continue hosting a radio show on Air America for a long time."

In an e-mail, Maddow confirms her desire to host both a TV and a radio program: "If O'Reilly, Hannity and Beck can do that, so can I." Still, Kireker has reason to be nervous. Calling from the Netroots convention in Austin, he'd just come from a panel during which mention of a still-imaginary Maddow TV show prompted an eruption of applause. "We've seen the potential for greatness in Rachel for years," says Kireker. "What's so remarkable is that now it's coming so quickly. This election cycle has propelled it forward in a meteoric fashion."

No kidding. Love is too weak a word to describe how some people feel about Rachel Maddow. They lurve her, loave her, luff her.

[Heh. Hey, I resemble that remark!]

New York magazine's online Intelligencer column recently ran an item headlined Why We're Gay for Rachel Maddow, and the blogosphere is dotted with posts like "I'm totally gay for Rachel Maddow." The "gay for Rachel" meme appears to transcend gender and sexuality. Women, men, straight and not straight: they're all gay for her. In a year in which we have decided to become postracial and postgender, Maddow may embody a media in which adoring fandom is postgay.

That's appropriate, since part of the hypnotic hold Maddow has on her audience is that while she is one of the first fully forged stars of the "liberal media," her commentary is, in a funny way, also postpartisan. During an incendiary primary season, Maddow maintained an almost maddening equilibrium, expressing dismay and appreciation for just about every candidate. She was very hard on Clinton; her face still hardens when she talks about the 3 am red phone ad, which she calls "an abomination," and Clinton's war vote, which she says is "unforgivable." But Maddow also finds herself "frequently underwhelmed" by Obama. "He got it right in opposing the war," she says, "but his war policy stuff now is bullshit. It's total bullshit, and I've never been impressed by it. One or two brigades a month? You want your son to be in the last brigade?"

Contrary to widely held opinion, Maddow did not endorse a candidate in the primary. "I have never and still don't think of myself as an Obama supporter, either professionally or actually," says Maddow, adding that she feels "liberated by having a professional role in which it's probably better for me not to take sides."

"She is a civics geek," says Vanessa Silverton-Peel, executive producer of The Rachel Maddow Show. "She wants to talk about AIDS in prison and the Constitution and the war in Iraq. Policy is her main focus. Not winning elections."

[OK, so I want to marry Bill Moyers, but have Rachel Maddow's love child. Or marry Rachel Maddow and have Bill Moyer's love child. Think their spouses would mind?]

On radio, Maddow starts every day with war news. She focuses hard on policy and on the politics of the absurd. "I'm fascinated by the evil child actor twins that run Poland," she says, as well as inflation in Zimbabwe ("How many bails of hundred-dollar bills does it take to buy bread today in Zimbabwe?"). She's obsessed with the Iraqi national soccer team, librarians and cocktail mixology; she once said that she'd like to "professionally bully people about what they drink." Then there are her specialties: foreign policy, the GI Bill, veterans groups. "That's the most satisfying thing about being able to do my own story selection," she says. "You get to pick that stuff. And whoever is President or in control in Congress is not going to affect that."

It's ironic that Maddow, perhaps Air America's most successful product, has traveled through the looking glass of partisan journalism and come out the other side an electoral agnostic, a liberal in the purest, almost mineral sense of the word. She loves the country, loves the Constitution and loves what is moving about politics. A worldview shaped by these concerns, one that maintains a well-manicured distance from electoral Sturm und Drang, could be a powerful asset for Maddow and the rest of the left-leaning media, an inoculation against future tune-out should they get their wish--an Obama administration that could rob them of their fury-fueled audiences.

Maddow, who has not owned a TV since 1990, tries to limit her exposure to online and print criticism of herself.

[Whew! That means there's no chance she'll stumble on my silly gushing!]

If and when she lands her own berth, and with it a nightly viewership unused to seeing a brainy lesbian with rock-solid expertise on military policy or the IAVA, that will become more difficult. She already bristles slightly when talking about how she gets all the girl questions. "I love the idea that I am the voice of woman," she says, gesturing at her T-shirt, baggy jeans and Red Sox cap. "Look at me. It's like: really? The one woman in the room is really mannish." In real life, as advertised on her website, Maddow dresses "like a first-grader" and hypothesizes that her mild androgyny might have greased her infiltration of boyworld punditry. "I look like a dude," she says.

[No, that isn't what that "D" on your forehead stands for. I'm talking from one to another here.]

Of course, for her television gigs, Maddow gets coiffed and painted and dressed up in what she calls "lady clothes" to fit a more traditional bill, a process she says she used to "resist and get angsty about," but to which she has now surrendered.

[I'll never forget the first day I caught Rachel in her "Primary Coverage" drag. She looked great, but that's when I knew she was in the running to move into the big leagues, or rather, the bigger leagues of fringe rant cable. Heh. Hey, I did my dissertation on Xena, while lived on the cable fringes as well. I'm not putting it down. I worked for 5 years at CNN. Fringe cable and the nutball Internet. That's my life! At least no one will ever go to see Rachel years later at Sci-Fi Cons. The Spinsterhaven Old Age Home that will take the place of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, maybe.]

When I ask whether some of her signature habits--the fascination with the evil twin Polish dictators, the obsession with the nuts and bolts of foreign policy--will go the way of her chunky glasses and naked lips, she balks. "The only reason I get these opportunities is because of my sensibility," she says. "I'm not being invited to do these things because of my looks or my facility with language. What they're after is the thing you're saying I have to trade off."

She continues, "My instinct sometimes is to trade it off. Like, 'Oh, I'm in the big leagues now so I better dial it back. But they don't want it dialed back. They are booking me or asking me to host because they like what they see."