This Media Life

Pundit's Progress

Conservative pundits, Tucker agrees, are meant to be professional outsiders. They don't go to journalism school, or work for the New York Times, or Time, or the Washington Post. They may even have been raised in different ways (the thing about conservative pundits is that they all seem to have found their calling in grammar school). In some sense, they are like East German athletes, or the Boys from Brazil -- they are discovered young, and then the system, the network, takes care of them.

The conservative way is not so much a career choice, they tend to believe, as it is the result of liberal-Establishment bias. Tucker would have liked to work for the New York Times. That he didn't or couldn't, he believes, with some small resentment, is partly a school thing. He went to Trinity College, which, while the alma mater of George Will, is, he says, not an A-school (and his fortunes there are less than clear -- "I think I'm technically a graduate"), plus "there were other factors, which I'm not going to articulate, in journalism hiring in 1991" that stood in the way of his getting a fancy job. Then, too, as a conservative, or "essentially libertarian," he would not, anyway, he supposes, have been suited to life in a large organization.

So he went the right-wing route. His first job was at Policy Review, a publication of the Heritage Foundation; next he went to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette to write editorials for the famous Clinton-hater Paul Greenberg (credited with the phrase "slick Willie"); then he was one of the earliest hires at The Weekly Standard, the Murdoch-backed conservative journal edited by Bill Kristol, which he still writes for; then he began his on-air career at Fox.

Of course, it is unlikely that had he gone to the New York Times or Time, he would now, at the age of 31, be the world's most ascendant pundit -- to be a dissonant voice, rather than an official voice, is of the higher value.

But his ascension is, really, if you analyze it, the product of a double dissonance: first as a contrast gainer to the liberal Establishment, and then as a contrast gainer to -- even a betrayer of -- the conservative Establishment.

Seemingly at his first opportunity, Tucker stepped out of the conservative-career route, opting for CNN over Fox. Just as smart was his move to become Talk magazine's house conservative. (I am reminded of Nora Ephron in the late sixties and early seventies writing a column about women for Esquire in its unreconstructed macho phase.)

His profile of Bush in the first issue of Talk is now one of the seminal pieces of the 2000 campaign. It's also one of the weirdest. While its message is that Bush is a real mensch, at the same time the picture of Bush is probably the most devastating that has been drawn. Here is Bush mocking Karla Faye Tucker ("Don't kill me") after her execution and unable to name a personal hero, save for Nolan Ryan.

Tucker claims to rue the piece now. The Bushites got mad at him and closed off his campaign access. But he must have known this would happen -- virtually any out-of-the-ordinary negative stuff will get a reporter blacklisted by a campaign.

The effect of the piece, however, was to turn him into the liberal's conservative.

He is, I think, different from the rest of the right-wing pundit crowd. It's a matter of tone (during the postelection phase of the campaign, The Spin Room frequently featured a Katherine Harris puppet), and, probably, a more finely honed sense of self-interest. A certain fluidity too. He seems to understand that attackers can't simply become defenders (not necessarily the same skill set at all) nor defenders attackers (ditto).

The Spin Room is a funny deal. It runs contrary to the usual cable conceit, which is that we're out here with you talking about those flawed people in there (the Beltway). In The Spin Room, it's Tucker, on the right, and Bill Press, on the left, clearly representing the inside-Washington position (Tucker seems to represent it most of all). They take e-mail and calls from out there -- from a nutty, uninformed populace.

Where Tucker is going, and where, it might make counterintuitive sense, George W. is trying to head himself, is into the Washington comfort zone -- a kind of fifties or early-sixties sort of place. We understand how the world works; you don't. We're in power; you're not. It is a funny notion, the Republicans making Washington their town again.

Indeed, contrary to the most basic right-wing doctrine, Tucker digs Washington. The town is not only good to him, it excites him. He likes his fellow Washington personalities. He likes being a Washington personality himself. There's a reason he has lunch so often at the Palm. It's not a guilty pleasure, either. "My life is excellent," he says.

He says it greatly annoyed him when, during the campaign, the Bush people tried to demonize Washington, or, as he says, "us." He goes on with some feeling about how he has always enjoyed talking to Gore, how comfortable he is talking to Gore (unlike most everyone else in the world), precisely because of their shared Washington insiderness.

I take some issue here with him. Or at least, I bring up the larger outside-the-Beltway perspective, which is, I believe, not a perspective that demonizes Washington but one that discounts it. "What happens in Washington seems to become progressively less important," I note. "From a power and influence perspective, you lose rather than gain. You don't have a preeminent position. More and more, you just exercise a back-office function -- I think that is the outsider's perception."

"How odd to hear that," he says. "I don't think that has crossed anyone's mind here." A burst of laughter. "Certainly, nobody I know is having an identity crisis."

Indeed, whether it is one of those transition moments when Washington feels the pride again, or a product of Bush's tattered but attached coattails, or of his own savvy media moves, Tucker Carlson is a man who has arrived. Politics, left, right, or center, has been very good to him, if to no one else.

E-mail: michael@burnrate.com