The Shadow Candidate

Los Angeles Times columnist Bob Scheer says that what most people don't understand about his friend and colleague Arianna Huffington is that she has the "drive of the immigrant." This translates into swift-moving passions -- for Keynesian economics at Cambridge, for Republican society as the model wife to oilman Michael Huffington, for a public conversion to social liberalism as a popular columnist and best-selling author. She cares about getting the best information about any system that affects her life, and cares a lot. Which goes a little way toward explaining what is going on this morning in her study.

Like an episode of The Osbournes, the homes of the wealthy always seem cluttered with essential hasslements, and at 8 a.m., the cool, wood-trimmed study in Arianna's $7 million Brentwood chateau is full of bodies. A gaggle of fresh-washed collegiate types straight out of an Abercrombie & Fitch ad are in a second-story loft yelling down phone messages: it's political consultant Bill Hillsman; it's Endeavor talent agency partner Ari Emmanuel; it's someone chairing a party for her at producer Lawrence Bender's house. Arianna's sister and a household employee materialize and dematerialize. Workmen and messengers drop off and pick up. A documentary film crew follows her as it has done since the day she announced her candidacy, looking a little worn after having been on the job since a 6 a.m. C-Span appearance.

Arianna herself, however, sits three feet away looking fresh, the auburn hair perfect, a bit of a game face on. She seems, in fact, like an athlete, peaking. The woman once described by the U.K. Guardian newspaper as "the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus," and by one Los Angeles magazine as "the Sir Edmund Hillary of social climbers," has a new crusade.

"Schwarzenegger starts running his television ads today," she says with that Zsa Zsa accent, her eyes flashing, "They don't say anything." Her eyes never leave my face. "We are going to start running some ads of our own."

The remark seems loaded with promise. One of her most recent activist campaigns, the Detroit Project, hit TV last year with ads parodying the Bush administration spots equating pot smoking with supporting terrorism (a stretch if there ever was one). The Project's ads instead tied terror funding to SUVs (another stretch: using more gas directly funds Saudi wahabism, which radicalized 19 of the 9/11 terrorists). Her campaign ads, she says, will focus squarely on her policies, but this kind of creative zinger is exactly what she enjoys best. Oregon's biggest newspaper, the Oregonian, found that her involvement with the Project crossed the line into advocacy, and cancelled her column.

In the race as a potential replacement for California Gov. Gray Davis, however, this kind of activism might be her very real Achilles' heel. Not because it isn't sincere, but because she takes it so seriously -- and in a direction not easy for voters to follow. Few candidates have taken positions as progressive as Huffington's in this campaign, and few have so thoroughly prepared to take unpopular stances against both party and corporate power as she has in her books, "How to Overthrow the Government" and "Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America." But while subverting the dominant paradigm, critics say she may be playing it just a bit too clever. For instance, in saying that her policies are "not a matter of right or left, but rather right or wrong." In downplaying the enlightenment that took her from Gingrich Republican to anti-corporate, pro-Green advocate of government programs for the downtrodden (she doesn't like the word liberal). In shaping a Third Way that's not yet defined. And even in running a populist campaign, when clearly big donors and big favors by Hollywood big guns have so far kept her afloat.