It started, like all the best Arianna stories, at a Beverly Hills dinner
party. The hostess was Candice Bergen, the Hollywood actress. The guests
included a couple of television actors from the political TV series The West
Wing and a real political couple from Washington: John McCain, the
Republican senator, and his wife Cindy.
Also at the party, held at Bergen’s home just a few weeks after George W Bush
won the 2000 presidential election, was Arianna Huffington (née
Stassinopoulos), the Greek-born socialite who has become one of America’s
most successful bloggers.
It was Huffington’s memories of that star-studded dinner last week that
provoked one of the more improbable rows of the 2008 election campaign. On
her website she had claimed that McCain, this year’s Republican candidate,
known for his independent streak, had confessed to his fellow diners that he
had failed to vote for Bush. Cindy, Huffington also alleged, had scribbled
her husband’s name on the ballot paper.
“Totally false,” retorted McCain, who had run against Bush in the Republican
primaries but bowed out after a vicious campaign of character assassination
that included the anonymous and false allegation that he had fathered a
black child out of wedlock.
McCain was later reconciled with Bush and has recently appeared to be on good
terms with him. On her website, Huffington bluntly described the Arizona
senator as “pandering in the service of ambition”. McCain, she said, “has
morphed into an older and crankier version of the man he couldn’t stomach
voting for in 2000”.
One of McCain’s senior advisers promptly retorted with an equally brutal
assessment of Huffington: “She’s a flake and a poser and an
attention-seeking diva.”
Last week the diva was revelling in all the fuss. “I know I’m right and there
are others who were there who will prove it,” she told me as she sipped
English tea in the lounge of the Four Seasons hotel in Manhattan. “McCain
didn’t vote for Bush – and he’s not the man he’s pretending to be.”
The headline-grabbing row proved yet another feather in the cap of The
Huffington Post, the startlingly successful website that features not only
Huffington’s personal blog but also an increasingly formidable range of
liberally inclined commentaries and news reports. Since Barack Obama and
Hillary Clinton began squaring off in the Democratic primary campaign, the
Post has become the most visited political site on the internet, according
to Hitwise, which measures online traffic.
“It has become my whole life, other than my two daughters,” Huffington said in
a soft voice that, even after 27 years in America – and a dozen more before
that in Britain – retains a marked Greek accent.
The McCain row could scarcely have come at a more opportune moment for the
57-year-old author, mother and budding internet tycoon. On Thursday she
published a new book, Right is Wrong, about the “far-right cowboys” and
“lunatic fringe” of the Republican party, which she refers to as “the dark,
mouldering, putrefied party of Bush, Cheney, Rove . . .”
Yet it was not so long ago that Huffington was a Republican supporter herself,
married to a wealthy Republican congressman. So why is she now so desperate
to derail the Republican election machine?
The answer may lie in another dinner party, held at the home of yet another of
Huffington’s Hollywood friends: Norman Lear, the film and television
producer. At this one, which took place in 2004, one of the guests was a
young black politician from Illinois called Barack Obama. “It was before he
was elected senator,” Huffington recalled. “I talked to him and it was clear
that you were in the presence of a real leader.”
Even when Clinton declared her presidential candidacy, Huffington had no doubt
about who would get her vote. “Yes, I was obviously excited by the prospect
of the first woman president,” she said. But having been opposed to the Iraq
war from the start, she could not countenance voting for a candidate who had
supported it.
“My main criticism of Clinton is that she not only voted for the war, but
never really challenged it, right up until the [election] primaries began,”
she said. “To break with the past we needed a candidate who really
represented change. Obama had the judgment from the beginning to be against
the war.”
Huffington first came to public notice in the 1970s as the first foreign woman
to be elected president of the Cambridge Union. In an early book, The Female
Woman, she took critical aim at feminism and quickly became a television
pundit-cum-game show personality. In London she was best known as the
girlfriend of Bernard Levin, the celebrated Times columnist and critic who
was 22 years her senior.
Private Eye used to call her a Greek pudding but the perfumed vision that
wafted into the Four Seasons last week looked more like a minimalist
dessert. Tall, slender and elegantly encased in a pencil-thin black trouser
suit, she is ageing as well as you might expect for a woman who can afford
the best of America’s beauty preservation products.
And she is rich, having acquired a fortune when she divorced her husband in
1997.A year later Michael Huffington, heir to a Texan oil fortune, declared
himself bisexual.
Somewhere along the way Huffington shed her Greek name – “I got tired of
having to spell Stassinopoulos,” she says. Meanwhile, she remains on the
best of terms with her exhusband, who is an occasional contributor to her
website.
“It wasn’t easy at the beginning, but we both made a huge effort for the
children,” she said. “We have our daughters’ birthdays and holidays
together. It has become a real friendship that I’m grateful for.” There is
no new man for now: “I’m not opposed to being attached,” she added wryly.
It is tempting to conclude that she shed her Republican views along with her
husband. In fact, she was never terribly convincing as an American
rightwinger – her views on abortion, gun control and gay rights owed more to
London than Louisiana. Which may be why she was initially so close to
McCain, another independent Republican.
“I admired him, even loved him then,” she said. “A large part of the
electorate hasn’t noticed McCain’s Shakespearian fall. His nobility has
given way to pandering to the party’s right wing – these voters still
clearly think of him as a straight shooter.”
Appalled by the way Senator John Kerry was treated by the Republican machine
in 2004, Huffington is nervous that Obama may become the next victim of
malevolent “rightwing messaging” and that the Republicans will find a way to
wriggle back to the White House, as they did in 2004.
None of Huffington’s views would matter much were it not for the millions who
now read the HuffPost, as her website has become known.
Huffington is editor-in-chief and dictates her own – occasionally racy –
blogs.
On Friday she headed off to a third anniversary party for the website. She has
several more stops on her book promotion tour and then has a speech to
deliver in London.
No one should think of trying to dismiss her as a rich socialite. Least of all
McCain: the two West Wing actors who also attended that dinner party have
now confirmed Huffington’s version of events.
The Huff is not based on fact, its based on somebody's opinion. An opinion that has more than a hint of personal vendetta against the Republican Party.
Auron, Springville, United States
Hey. where was my invitation to the third anniversary party?
Andrew Breitbart, Los Angeles, USA
Ariana was a funny, witty, erudite woman when she was young . Now she is at best, a dilettante. Rather like a coffee table book. good to look at, but no-one reads Perfect for the Glitteratti. She deserves better. Blog meister-please. Obama -light
Desmond Taylor, Houston, USA Tx
You don't need to tell me. I love the Huff and log in almost every day. If nothing else, it gives me hope that commonsense and scepticism are alive and well in the US. It is in all our best interests to hope so.
Angela, Cheltenham, Australia