A WOMAN ON THE VERGE

By NINA BURLEIGH/WASHINGTON

WHEN YOUR HUSBAND THROWS nearly $30 million at a Senate seat and has nothing to show for it but a hilltop stone mansion in Washington, what's a woman to do? For Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, the answer has been to use will, charm and provocation to become one of the capital's leading conservative lights. "In the last few months, I started literally waking up with these columns," she purrs in a cadenced Greek accent. Prominent newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, have been happy to publish her. And while Senate majority leader Bob Dole, whom she's pronounced unelectable as President, might wish she had rolled over and gone back to sleep or back home to Santa Barbara, California, Republican Washington is agog.

Huffington has evolved from political wife to policy entrepreneur, a one-woman think tank with more clout than her husband Michael--an oil-company heir and former California Congressman--ever dreamed of. In one year, she has won her own weekly cable-TV talk show, co-hosted CNN's Crossfire, testified twice before Congress and become a "senior fellow" at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a think tank associated with Newt Gingrich, where she heads up her own Center for Effective Compassion, which promotes private giving to replace the welfare state. With all that, she has become the goddess of the G.O.P. "revolution," channeling Gingrich's nine-point plan to Renew American Civilization in her own beguiling voice. Gingrich has included her "Twelve Steps to American Renewal" in the selected readings for his televised classes. Each gushingly refers to the other in speeches and interviews.

To many Republicans, Huffington was just a purveyor of gooey New Age political spirituality until she began to take on the leading G.O.P. candidate for President in a highly personal manner. On CNN early this month, she castigated Dole's rhetoric as old and tired, adding that "he had to read his opening and closing statements." Then she wrote an op-ed piece in the Journal that declared, "Leading a revolution means more than borrowing a bottle of Grecian Formula." Huffington wants Gingrich to be the nominee, though she seems willing to consider Colin Powell. "I believe only Newt Gingrich can be the ideal standard-bearer for the Republican Party at this moment," she says.

Dole responded with heavy artillery. Both sides admit she got a phone call from campaign manager Scott Reed. She says he threatened her with blackmail. Dole's camp denies that, calling her "hysterical." But the incident played into Huffington's hand, showing the Dole campaign overreacting to a mere newspaper column. "She's married to a rich man," sputtered Dole campaign spokesman Nelson Warfield, "and if that's the criterion, Zsa Zsa Gabor should be on the Sunday talk shows." Her seriousness has also been questioned on account of her past association with California cult leader John-Roger.

Huffington, 45, laughs it off. "Pericles said courage is knowledge of what not to fear," she said in an interview at her sparsely furnished downtown Washington office. At Gingrich's Progress and Freedom Foundation, Huffington, in her designer suits and coppery mane, is taken very seriously. "The thing some people miss about Arianna is her intellect," says Jeffrey Eisenach, president of the foundation. But, he says, she is no dilettante, even though some people may be led to think so because of her ties to New York society and her wealth (husband Michael is reportedly worth at least $75 million, his share of the $600 million Huffco oil fortune). The top floor of the Huffington home has been transformed into a suite of offices for her, housing a full-time staff of three. Her assistants research and edit political columns, monographs and speeches that seek to advance Gingrich's cause and torment his rivals.

When she's not plotting with Gingrich and his congressional allies, Huffington socializes with the city's young conservatives, who admire her social grace and hang on every word of her brash conservatism. At a dinner honoring another conservative deity, Margaret Thatcher, she was escorted by David Brock, the writer for the American Spectator who reported the Arkansas state troopers' allegations about President Clinton's infidelities. She played host to a book party for author and former Bush aide Jim Pinkerton, a young conservative Washington author. Another new friend is attorney Laura Ingraham, former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and a member of a group of counterfeminists who are shaking up G.O.P. power circles. Ingraham calls Huffington "a great role model" because of her warmth. Unlike most important people in Washington, says Ingraham, Huffington "never looks over your shoulder to see who else is at the party."

Huffington owes much of her newfound status to Gingrich, who first noticed her on C-SPAN giving a speech at a conservative conference in 1993. (She spoke on the question "Can Conservatives Have a Social Conscience?") It was ideological combustion at first sight, or something like that. Gingrich immediately invited her to speak at a Republican conference a month later. A Republican aide there recalls Gingrich's reaction to the statuesque Greek immigrant: "My clearest recollections were with the rapture in which he held her. He was like a puppy dog." She quickly became a member of Gingrich's group of "Big Thinkers," invited to most of his retreats. "The area where we connect intellectually is this area of replacing the welfare state," Huffington says. "Those of us who care passionately about effective compassion want to make sure there is a social conscience in the Republican revolution." These days Huffington makes sure she praises Gingrich's wife Marianne too.

Huffington was stung by press skepticism about her devotion to volunteer work, which waned after her husband's election campaigns. Now she is trying to start a new television show called Beat the Press, with pro-Clinton Camille Paglia as her co-host. Says Paglia: "I view her as a major contemporary diva. I knew I would help her when I heard she posed with a rubber chicken. This is what we need in this country." "There's really nothing like self-deprecating humor," Huffington says. "We need to have humor in politics." As the spectacle of Arianna Huffington unfolds, the Republicans don't know whether to laugh or cry.