The Arianna Sideshow

By ANDREW FERGUSON

It's not easy getting a political convention off the ground--especially when the convention is not really a convention but a "shadow convention," and especially when the politics being convened is not the old-fashioned kind but a new, revolutionary kind of politics that will "transcend the old categories of left and right." Arianna Huffington has been learning this lesson the hard way all summer. While Americans across the country--hundreds of them! maybe thousands!--eagerly await the twin spectacle of the Republican and Democratic conventions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, the syndicated columnist and former Newt Gingrich confidant has been trying to round up participants for a self-styled alternative--the Shadow Conventions 2000, dubbed by sponsors as a "Citizens' Intervention in American Politics."

"It's really exploding in ways I could not have imagined," Huffington says, riding through downtown Philadelphia a few weeks before the Republicans are scheduled to arrive. Today she has already held a press conference, visited two newspaper editorial boards, met with a dozen area activists and scouted the arena where the shadow revels are to be held. But the complications never let up. An aide's cell phone beeps, and he hands it over. "Bill Bradley," he says. Bradley has unofficially agreed to appear at one of the shadow conventions.

"Bill!" she says, though in her heavily Greek-accented English it comes out "Beeeel!" "How are you?"

A long silence ensues.

"Oh, Bill, that's ridiculous," Huffington says at last. "No, no, no. He's just trying to make trouble, Bill. It is false. He does not know what he is talking about."

In time she hangs up, evidently having mollified Bradley. "He just saw Bob Novak on Inside Politics," she explains, referring to the conservative columnist and the CNN political show on which he regularly appears. "Bill's worried because Novak says no one knows who is financing our conventions. Novak says if people knew, they would not want to appear. This is false." She sighs deeply. "But this is the kind of thing we will have to put up with. The Establishment hates anything it cannot control. What it cannot control, it tries to eliminate."

Huffington and her colleagues are convinced they have hit on a formula that will roil the muddy middle of American politics, from Bushies on the one side to Gorites on the other. Their plan is media-savvy and politically astute. Concurrent with the party conventions, an assortment of activists, professional pols and show-biz celebrities with populist pretensions (from stand-ups like Bill Maher to superstars like Warren Beatty) will gather for four days of speechifying, seminar giving and satirical merrymaking, all on the indisputable assumption that the national press corps (and the public) will be so starved for spectacle and spontaneity that it will lavish attention on them--and their issues. CNN and C-SPAN have expressed interest in broadcasting some sessions live.

"We want to throw light on the things that no one will be talking about in the other conventions--and have a genuine debate, not an infomercial," Huffington says. She and her co-conveners--who include Scott Harshbarger of Common Cause and antipoverty activist Jim Wallis--have whittled their agenda down to three items. One day will be devoted to campaign-finance reform, the next to the growing income gap between rich and poor, and the third to "reforming"--read liberalizing--the nation's drug laws.

If all goes well, organizers hope, this trinity of issues will form the nucleus for a "new politics," re-energizing the half of the electorate now so alienated from the old politics that it no longer bothers to vote. Campaign-finance reform is the thread that ties all other reforms together. "It's no accident that the major parties aren't addressing the income gap and are ignoring the failed war on drugs," says Harshbarger. "The constituencies that are hurt by these issues aren't donating millions of dollars to the political parties. Unless you fix campaign finance, you can't move on to the other issues." Still, it seems a curiously arbitrary trio of concerns--particularly the drug-war component, which scores scarcely a blip in any catalog of the public's disenchantments. Why single out drug laws instead of guns, for example, or the environment, or educational policy, or any of half a dozen issues with greater populist appeal?

One reason--ironically enough, given the convener's hostility to big money in politics--might be cash. A third of the convention's tab will be picked up by organizations funded by George Soros, the international financier whose passion for ending the drug war has made him an all-purpose bogeyman for political establishmentarians everywhere. Other funding will come from foundations and individual donors across a narrow span of the political spectrum, from the center to the center left. "Transcending the old categories of left and right," after all, is a favorite rhetorical trope of liberals who are tired of being dismissed in a political culture that makes "moderation" the pre-eminent virtue. Ideological taxonomists will find the lineup of shadow convention speakers--from Jesse Jackson to Paul Wellstone--eerily predictable and not particularly transcendent. All that's missing is a candlelight vigil for the Scottsboro Boys.

The monochromatic ideology of the shadow conventions has proved to be self-reinforcing as Republicans get skittish about signing on. John McCain will open the gathering in Philadelphia with a call for campaign-finance reform, but--here as elsewhere--not many of the party faithful will follow him. Jack Kemp, originally publicized as keynoter, withdrew from the conventions last week. "Jack just feels this isn't something he's comfortable participating in," says a spokesman. "The more he looked into it, there just didn't seem to be the balance and the genuine debate he'd been hoping for." Kemp's retreat leaves Congressmen Tom Campbell and Chris Shays as the only other two national Republicans participating--though by week's end Shays' representatives said their man was rethinking his appearance.

Until recently, attracting Republicans has never been a problem for Huffington. She has been a fixture in G.O.P. circles for a decade or more. Born and reared in Greece, she attended Cambridge University, became president of the Cambridge Union debating team and wrote several well-received books before moving to the U.S. in the 1980s. She married Texas oil millionaire Michael Huffington and helped guide his political career, which ended spectacularly after one term in Congress when he spent $30 million of his own money unsuccessfully running for U.S. Senator from California in 1994. Her career flourished out of the ashes of his: Arianna became a regular on TV gab shows, founded her own think tank (now defunct), launched a syndicated column and settled in as a close adviser to Gingrich, who was busily undertaking a revolution of his own.

Soon she divorced her husband--and, figuratively anyway, Gingrich too. "It became clear to me that Newt didn't care about the issues I cared about," she says now, "that all his talk, sometimes very eloquent, about poverty and caring for the least among us was just window dressing." She abandoned Washington for Los Angeles, where she shares an Italianate mansion with her two preteen daughters. She is impatient with her old Republican friends who say she has moved to the left (those old categories again). "I have become radicalized, but it's not as though I'm suddenly praising the Democratic Party. Both parties are equally bankrupt, equally at fault."

If it sounds a little vague--well, that's how movements often begin. No one should underestimate Huffington's powers as a publicist for the causes she champions. Says Wallis, a veteran of radical politics: "We've waited years for someone like her." Her enthusiasms are worth taking seriously. "She doesn't so much evolve as have incarnations," says an old colleague. And the incarnations are invariably suited to the politico-sociological moment. She has an unerring sense for the next big thing. In the early 1970s, she wrote one of the first anti-feminist manifestos--The Female Woman, a counterpoint to Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch--anticipating the backlash against feminism before there was a hint of it. Her next book, After Reason, called for a commingling of politics and religion just as American evangelicals roused themselves from decades of political apathy. During the era of Reaganite glitz, she settled into the life of a New York author-socialite, the celebrity biographer of Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso. When the Gingrich revolution seemed a far-fetched pipe dream, she signed on as Madame Defarge, and had the sense to decamp when it collapsed.

Now she anticipates yet another new politics, born of a wide and deep disgruntlement with the status quo. Her evidence for the coming revolution is thin. The low voter turnouts she and her shadow conveners bewail as signs of disgust might just as plausibly be taken for the sleepy indifference of a fat and happy populace. But her larger charge--that the two parties, in thrall to a self-satisfied elite, have become homogeneous, to the detriment of a robust political debate--is far more plausible. Anyone who doubts it should be forced to explain the difference between George Bush's "compassionate conservatism" (or is it "conservative compassion"?) and Al Gore's "pragmatic idealism" (or is it "idealistic pragmatism"?) in 300 words or less. With both parties staking claim to the same territory, she sees room for something new and, of course, for herself.