Everybody Loves Rachel Maddow [View all]

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http://prospect.org/article/everybody-loves-rachel-maddow

Everybody Loves Rachel Maddow

Tom Carson

March 26, 2012

With brains, good humor—and too much showmanship—MSNBC’s biggest 
star has captured the liberal imagination.


(Photo by Frank Micelotta/PictureGroup)


I can’t say for sure when it happened—it was after Barack Obama’s swearing-in yet before Keith Olbermann got suspended for giving money to Democrats—but at some point it began dawning on people that the face of MSNBC was Rachel Maddow. Certainly her bosses thought so. Not only did she have her own prime-time show but she also began landing the gigs traditionally reserved for a network’s Grand Poo-Bah, in particular, anchoring election-night coverage.

You can understand why MSNBC execs would want Maddow in this talismanic chair for the 2012 campaign. Young and sunny, she’s their highest-rated anchor, especially among the magical 25-to-54 demographic, which makes her the ideal front woman for a network whose tagline is “Lean Forward.” Just as important, she’s their easiest and most polite host, a woman who once chastised Pat Buchanan on Dan Abrams after he told a Clinton campaign worker to “shut up,” a rebuke that left the old pitchfork-waver abashed. Although she can sometimes be too doggone cute, Maddow embodies virtues—rationality, good humor, and courtesy—that make her an alluring alternative to our culture’s furious partisan stridency. Her upbeat civility is perfect for wrangling MSNBC’s election-night panel, which includes such monsters of vainglory as bluff, blue-collar Ed Schultz, Lawrence (“I’m the real insider here”) O’Donnell, and the Reverend Al Sharpton, whose patter has become so lazily formulaic that he seems like a refugee from Portlandia. Smiling and cajoling, Maddow turns them as amiable as puppies.

Maddow is someone liberals can feel good about themselves for liking. She has left-of-Barack politics, yet because her father is a retired Air Force captain, she can speak of caring about the troops without shamming. She’s got the intellectual credentials that our side loves—an Oxford Ph.D.! —yet she’s also down with pop culture, talking of her life in terms of John Hughes movies. Topping it all off, she’s an openly lesbian anchor in an era when people still discuss whether Anderson Cooper is gay. Not so long ago, being out would have kept Maddow off the air. Now, it feels positively ordinary.

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Watching her program, you can see how carefully she studied Olbermann’s way of juggling entertainment, politics, and headlines. She learned that a news show should be a show, with humor, shifting rhythms of monologue and dialogue, catchily labeled segments, and a deployment of old clips that aspires to prestidigitation. This vast galaxy is a wonder to be exploited, whether you’re tracing how presidents have talked up war over the decades or how once--maverick Republicans like John McCain went from embracing cap-and-trade to shunning it. Maddow also grasped—and shared—Olbermann’s respect for language. No news show in history has ever been so fastidiously, even preeningly written as Countdown. But where Olbermann increasingly came to read his lines, even his funny ones, with an overbearing, almost martial precision—by God, he was going to let you know how magnificently written his program was—Maddow has always been shrewd at knowing how to make herself appealing. Although The Rachel Maddow Show is probably the second most painstakingly written news show ever, she reads her script in a deliberately shambly way that feels down-to-earth. (Think of her wearing that blue hard hat in the terrific MSNBC promo at the Hoover Dam.) Her persona appeals to the viewer’s intelligence by being hard to catch in the act of being intelligent.