Rachel Maddow: Political Game Changer

"I think I have a fear in general about whether being a pundit is a worthwhile thing to be," Rachel Maddow tells me over dinner at a Latin restaurant in lower Manhattan. It's more than the ordinary self-deprecation of someone who just got her own cable commentary show. It's an insecurity essential to the on-air style that's powered the 35-year-old's rapid rise from a wacky morning radio show in western Massachusetts to the liberal radio network Air America and now to her own prime-time show on MSNBC.

Maddow is not a Tim Russert or a Chris Matthews -- an ostensibly nonpartisan interviewer who badgers politicians and policy-makers about contradictions in their records. Nor is she a Rush Limbaugh or a Glenn Beck -- an attack dog who deals in calculated anger, bluster, and outrage. She's no mild-mannered liberal like Alan Colmes or a veteran observer like Wolf Blitzer or David Gregory. Maddow has broken the broadcasting mold. She has succeeded as an avowed liberal on television precisely because she is not a liberal version of conservatives like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Unlike so many progressive media figures who sought to replicate the on-air habits of the aggressive shock jocks of the right, she stumbled upon a workable style for the left. She is liberal without apology or embarrassment, bases her authority on a deep comprehension of policy rather than the culture warrior's claim to authenticity, and does it all with a light, even slightly mocking, touch. She proves that liberals can attract viewers on television when they actually act like, well, liberals.

Maddow's accidental path was paved by the success of Keith Olbermann's Countdown on MSNBC. Neither Olbermann's impressive ratings (second only to Bill O'Reilly's) nor his liberalism were foreseen by the network, which hired him in 2003 as a straight newscaster. Olbermann's audience, along with the declining popularity of Republican media outlets as the country soured on the Bush agenda, emboldened MSNBC to give Maddow her own hour of prime time, a coveted 9 P.M. slot immediately following Countdown. (The Rachel Maddow Show debuted Sept. 8.)

The announcement was interpreted by some as a turning of the tide, a sign that cable news networks were no longer a hostile environment to liberalism. But, for her part, Maddow never accepted the idea that cable executives harbor a conservative bias. As she put it, "It's sort of the first refuge of lefty scoundrels to say, 'I get the real picture, and the mainstream media would explode if they ever handled it.' But if you can make it interesting, the mainstream media is interested in it."

Maddow started her career with more interest in changing policy than in changing the media. After attending Stanford, she studied at Oxford, where as a Rhodes scholar (she says she was the first openly gay American to receive the honor) she completed a dissertation that expanded on work she was already doing as an AIDS activist. Her efforts were based on a profound public-health insight: Prisons offer a surprising opportunity for AIDS prevention and treatment because inmates are a vulnerable population collected in one place and have a constitutional right to health care.

In 1999, Maddow was supporting herself with odd jobs (she met her partner Susan Mikula after the artist hired Maddow to do yard work) when she attended an open casting call for a disc-jockey position at a local radio station in Northampton, Massachusetts, and scored her own morning show. Five years later, when she heard about a new liberal radio network forming in New York, which would come to be known as Air America, she concocted what she calls a great "caper" to get a job at the network -- involving, among other gambits, having an ex-girlfriend impersonate one of Al Franken's students at Harvard.