Cityside

Err America

Rhodes is the only one who has the liberal-rage thing down pat—which makes her perhaps the only proven model for how liberal talk might compete nationally. Brooklyn-born, with a confident, rapid-fire delivery—like a smoky, low-pitched Marisa Tomei—she’s been No. 1 in South Florida for years. “Randi really has an antic sense of humor, both self-deprecating and kind of abusive at the same time,” marvels Air America CEO Mark Walsh, who consulted on the Kerry campaign.

But Rhodes tells me she’s skeptical of the whole concept of an all-liberal station—or “format purity,” as it’s called. After all, she followed Rush on a Clear Channel station and beat him handily. “It better work,” says Rhodes, who moved here from Florida a month ago. “I’d like to tell you everything’s wonderful and we’re all one big happy family, a big comedy troupe, but we’re not. Al is Al and Janeane is Janeane—they’re movie stars and TV stars. I’m a radio person. Radio on the show-business totem pole is where the dog lifts his leg.”

It shouldn’t be that way. Listening to Rhodes, you get an idea of what left-wing talk can be—an ecstatically cathartic guilty pleasure for liberals dying for permission to be furious. She’s capable of reasoned discussion, too: When Pat Buchanan called in on her debut show, the two had a civil conversation about the differences between conservatives and neoconservatives. It helped that he was also against the war.

But that melee with Nader was more than just rude. It felt good. Almost as good as when Rhodes predicted that Osama bin Laden’s death would be the next October Surprise.

After Nader hung up, a longtime listener called in from Florida: “He has no idea how nasty you can get. That was mild!”

Next, a listener called from Connecticut. “I love you!” she said. “Even though you’re abrasive, you’re my favorite one on the station.”

“Well, there’s only been two of us on so far,” Rhodes noted—herself and Franken.

“Out of the two,” the woman said, “you win.”

Janeane Garofalo, on from 8 to 11 p.m., has the makings of a blisteringly marvelous pundit. But she’s so busy scolding right-wingers for appealing to people’s lesser nature that she, at least so far, won’t leap into the mud herself. As Bob Kerrey might say, she has a round in her chamber and she won’t use it. The closest she came on opening night was in an exchange with her co-host, Sam Seder. “But if God chose George Bush to be president, would that mean God wanted the White House to lie?” she said.

“Listening to Randi Rhodes, you get an idea of what left-wing talk can be—a guilty pleasure for liberals dying for permission to be furious.”

“Or, ergo ipso facto—God is a liar!” Seder said.

There's something clubby and erudite about her show, like an after-hours set at Surf Reality. At one point, Garofalo cited how today’s conservatives demonstrate “Martin Buber’s I-It relationship with the world, as opposed to the more respectful I-Thou relationship.” And she and Seder sound too far away from the mikes—they need to be less stagey and more intimate. While Garofalo may artfully refer on the air to Brit Hume’s “Algonquin Round Table of apologists,” in person she has angrier words for right-wing talk. “They’ve actually done a drive-by on the whole culture,” Garofalo tells me, sitting in the windowless office she shares with Seder. “They have somehow, through propaganda, demagoguery, repetition, been able to persuade a large portion of the electorate to vote against their better interests.”

Garofalo is considering adding more comic bits: One possible future segment, “Slander Theater,” spreads nasty rumors about conservatives in skit form, the joke being “it can’t be slander if it’s theater.” But her comedy, over the years, has mutated into something more mournful and less funny. “Most people aren’t funny,” she says. “Most comics aren’t that funny. And most people don’t think I’m funny. A lot of people bristle at this term spoken word. But that’s what it has become in my late thirties—it just has. You know, it’s not as much anymore like ‘I’m so fat!’ But especially since 2000, what is funny? This miscarriage of justice in the Supreme Court—how in the world do you find this funny? Sometimes I’m just so disgusted by my government and my media that I can’t find it funny.”

If anything, Seder shows more promise of becoming a fire-breather; at least he can admire the tactic from a distance. “Bin Laden is living in the United States,” Seder tells me, “and he has blonde hair. He’s probably got some type of eating disorder. And he drinks too much, and then occasionally writes an op-ed under the name Ann Coulter.”

“Ann Coulter is a sociopath,” Garofalo replies sternly (a far cry from her measured statement on the air that “Ann Coulter is very intolerant; at least her public persona is”). “And what she does is drag our culture down to a more aggressive, meaner, anti-intellectual kind of Redneck Nation.” But then she waters down the insult with a joke: “My contention is that she is a performance artist. I contend that she is, indeed, Andy Kaufman.”

Moments later, Seder says that Bush’s proposal for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage made him feel as if he were in “Germany, six months before Kristallnacht.” Silence. Garofalo lets out a nervous laugh.

“He says that with a much lighter hand on the air,” she says apologetically.

In time, Garofalo’s college-teach-in rhetoric (“Why are taxes so wrong? What’s so wrong with political correctness?”) could be the first step toward a new style of liberal talk that’s neither Rush-like nor NPR-esque. And Franken’s comedy bits about corporate greed (“Accountants Without Borders”) do hit the mark. If it sounds like they’re preaching to the converted, that’s not such a bad place to start—seeking out a silent, frustrated liberal constituency. You can hear the formula working when Franken steps in with lines like “You know, we’re more religious than the right. If you cut out everything in the New Testament about helping the poor, it would be a perfect little book to smuggle drugs in.”

But the formula falters when Franken is given a few minutes to ad-lib on the glories of liberalism. It’s a radio-technique problem: Unless you’re hopped up on emotion, your voice sounds like sludge. “Sometimes there’s a tug and pull,” Franken admits, “because you really do have to have information that needs to come out, and on the other hand you have an instinctive need to keep the audience entertained. You step it up. You’re an entertainer. But the thing to worry about is when I get too big for my britches. Just wait. I only start getting too big for my britches when everything’s falling apart. Then I get mad. And then I act like an asshole.”

Liberal listeners may already be wondering: How long will we have to wait?