POLITICAL JUNKIES, REJOICE

By Margaret Carlson/Washington

Congratulations! you have just won a date with John F. Kennedy Jr. Well, that's not exactly how the publisher of the new political magazine George (for George Washington) put it. But the fact that John F. Kennedy Jr. is editor in chief of the upstart publication is not incidental to the incredible 5.7% sign-up rate for the nearly quarter-million potential subscribers contacted-more than twice the industry standard. Even the John-lite mailing (ones with his name inside but not on the envelope) got a 5.1% response.

Sitting in his 41st floor office in New York City's midtown, Kennedy, a former assistant district attorney, says the glossy nonpartisan bimonthly will be a "fan magazine, a Rolling Stone of politics" (referring to the magazine that covers U.S. culture with an emphasis on music). He picks up a notebook and draws a big circle labeled politics intersected by satellites of books, Hollywood, media and music. "Instead of writing about the highest-grossing film, we'll write about the best campaign ad." Kennedy, who has a habit of referring to himself as "sort of'' an editor, laughs at his own doodling. Serious yet humble, he's picked the brains of hundreds of experts.

The great return rate on George's initial mailing was enough to attract the attention and bankroll of David J. Pecker, president of Hachette Filipacchi Magazines, the French-owned publisher of 19 magazines, including Elle. Hachette plans to pour as much as $25 million into the new venture and already has pledges for 100 pages of advertising for the first two issues.

But George won't be the only political magazine to launch in September.in the U.S. Last week a group of semifamous conservatives (William Kristol, a Republican strategist and former Dan Quayle adviser; John Podhoretz, son of Commentary editor in chief Norman Podhoretz and a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan; and Fred Barnes of the New Republic and The McLaughlin Group) announced that Rupert Murdoch had agreed to put up $3 million to start the Standard. The weekly journal hopes to be to conservatives what the New Republic at its best was to liberals: a journal of opinion intellectually honest enough to criticize its friends (Kristol points out he was skeptical of the $4.5 million book deal between U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Rupert Murdoch) and confident enough to give space to its opponents.

The Standard sprang from a series of attention-grabbing memos by Kristol when he was chairman of the Project for the Republican Future, the most famous of which declared, "There is no health-care crisis," and the most prescient of which provided a blueprint for conservatives becoming a governing majority. Last October, Kristol and Podhoretz decided that these papers could also be the blueprint for a new magazine. They arranged to meet Murdoch for dinner in Beverly Hills, California, and suddenly those memos were worth $3 million more than the paper they were printed on.

It's a long way from a memo to a magazine. Kristol is eager to make his paper "real journalism, with real reporting." Like fellow neophyte Kennedy, who has surrounded himself with experience-marketing executive Michael Berman and former Rolling Stone editor Eric Etheridge -- Kristol is calling on journalists who know what they are doing, including David Brooks of the Wall Street Journal. "If we don't occasionally upset conservatives, we won't be doing a good job," Kristol says, adding that he will not be mindlessly cheerleading for such conservative ideas as the flat tax. "We'll debate it before deciding whether to embrace it."

The Standard, which hopes for a circulation of 100,000, enters a crowded field on the right dominated by National Review, a biweekly with a circulation of 265,200, and the more sensational American Spectator, whose subscriptions have gone from 30,000 to 300,000 since 1992. "Any new magazine is a good thing,'' says Michael Kinsley of the New Republic. "But there's no crying need for another right-wing magazine."

For Murdoch, a serious magazine gives him the opportunity to counterprogram his image as a schlockmeister (Melrose Place, the Sun), although it is likely to cost him more like $20 million, according to media investor Christopher Meigher. But Murdoch has the deep pockets and deep ego that will keep him in for the long haul. Barnes says, "He's in it to have a Washington presence, not to make an instant profit." Whereas Kennedy, who has all the presence in the world, may be eager to find out what he can accomplish with it. --With reporting by Ratu Kamlani/New York

With reporting by Ratu Kamlani/New York