MSNBC's star commentator, fresh from a crushing defeat at AirAmerica, is profiled in USA Today Weekend:
MSNBC's liberal talk show host Rachel Maddow on her cable competition, who won't show and that "centrist Democrat" Obama
by Gayle Jo Carter
It's no exaggeration to say that The Rachel Maddow Show cemented MSNBC's place as the anti-Fox News Channel during the 2008 presidential election. Although Rachel Maddow's nightly political gabfest is a place for liberals to get fired up, the Rhodes Scholar is not quite giving President Obama a free ride. In a post-show chat, we asked Maddow, 36, about that, her competition and whether she plans to marry her longtime partner, artist Susan Mikula. The inside scoop:
Has President Obama disappointed you? No, but I never thought he was going to be a liberal. I thought he was running as a pretty centrist Democrat, and I think he has governed as a pretty centrist Democrat.
How do you stay up on the news? I exist, essentially, totally online in my news-gathering experience, and that means you can seek out what you want and find almost as much depth as you want on any one thing that you want.
I guess you don't have a favorite broadcast news anchor, then? I've actually never watched network news my whole life. Growing up, we were not a network news family.
What about your cable competition, Sean Hannity or Larry King? I've never actually seen a whole prime-time show on Fox, and I've never seen an episode of Larry King. I was booked to go on [King's] show in January 2008, but that was the night that MSNBC offered me a contract to be exclusive, so I had to cancel.
Is there someone you'd like to have on your show who won't do it? Dick Cheney or his daughter Liz Cheney, who has done every other cable news show in the world but won't come on my show.
What do they say? Liz Cheney has been very friendly, but the answer's always no. She even ran ads on her website talking about how people on MSNBC don't want to debate the real issues. I was like, "Come on, I'll debate anything with you." The [former] vice president's office doesn't bother responding.
What would you ask him? It would be a long discussion. I would essentially treat it like a trial.
Do you and your partner want to get married? We live in the state [Massachusetts] where the right has existed for the longest, and we have not made a decision to get married. This spring, we will have been together for 11 years, and our relationship is serious and happy, mature, monogamous. We like having the right, and we think that everybody should have the right, but we're making our own decision about whether we should exercise it.
Do you want kids? No. We both have really rich family lives with our extended families, and neither one of us has ever wanted to have kids.
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Honestly, I think, of all the commentators and reporters on MSNBC, Maddow has the best chance of succeeding. Intellectually, she's way ahead of Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, and, although she gets her facts confused at times and lets her vehemence cloud her logic, she uses the language well and manages to stay on point. Why the interviewer brought her personal life into the article is beyond me. It has nothing at all to do with her on air work and adds nothing to the review.
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