Booknotes

Ms. ARIANNA HUFFINGTON (Author, "How to Overthrow the Government"): I wanted to explain a little bit my own journey, how I came to write a book like that, which is pretty radical. And so I described that scene at a dinner that Boyden Gray, who used to be in--a counsel at George Bush's White House--he gave a dinner in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Rush Limbaugh, and it was a kind of conservative who's who. And I walked in, and Mrs. Limbaugh got very angry that I had been invited because I had written a series of columns criticizing her husband. And one in particular that she objected to was the one that referred to his social Darwinism and are we really going to allow conservativism to be hijacked by the Rush Limbaugh version of conservativism?

And so I suddenly looked around, and I realized that the room was full of people whose husbands I had criticized in my column, including people I--I really liked, and that became a sort of starting point for the book, about my own journey of being a Republican, thinking that Newt Gingrich was really going to put poverty on top of the agenda, as he had said, and gradually being disillusioned and coming to the conclusion, as I come in this book, that it will take a movement to really change things.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: I kind of heard her--I didn't hear the exact words, but I saw her consulting with Boyden and that she wasn't happy to see me there. And then I asked Boyden what she had said, and he had told me.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Oh, no, not in that stark way, which is why I decided to include it. But what happens is to have people like Susan Armey, Dick Armey's wife, whom I really like, whom I used to see when I lived in Washington--she had a shop, a clothing store, and I would have take--I used to take my little girls, and we would go shopping there on a Saturday. And then I started writing this column; it was very critical of her husband, his style of leadership. And at that dinner, that was actually the hardest moment. She came up to me and she said, `How could you do that? I thought you were our friend.' And there was nothing personal about them in the attacks, and yet obviously, she had taken them very personal, even though they're political in nature. And that is a problem.

But I remember Maureen Dowd telling me, when I started doing a syndicated column, `If you're going to do a good column, be prepared to make no new friends.'

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Five years.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Well, there's definitely some pressure if you really care about what everybody thinks of you to conform, to be nice, to pick up the phone and tell them maybe what you think, but not put it in the paper. Actually that's what Bob Shrum told me, because the--the criticism is across both aisles. Bob Shrum had run Al Checchi's campaign for governor in California and run it into the ground, in my opinion, and I said that in a column, in which I said that at the beginning of the campaign, Al Checchi looked like Tony Perkins; at the end of the campaign, he looked like Tony Perkins at the end of "Psycho" because Shrum had run so many negative ads it really backfired.

And I saw him at a mutual friend's wedding, and he came up to me and said, `Couldn't you have picked up the phone and told me that?' And that's not the same. I wasn't making a point about him specifically, but about the culture of campaign consultants and negative campaigning.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Well, one of the--one of the first columns I wrote against Bob Dole was one called The Presidency's Not An Entitlement. And it was really why he should not be nominated. That was a few months before he was nominated, right? I felt it was a terrible indictment of the Republican Party, which was so hierarchical that they would choose as a nominee somebody who was really unelectable, I mean, against Bill Clinton. It was so obvious. I mean, it's obvious in retrospect, but it should have been obvious at the time.

And since then, of course, what he has done I--I find really unacceptable. I think for a public servant to be pushing Viagra--I know he--he calls them public service announcements for Pfizer, but--and for erectile dysfunction, but it's basically cashing in. There's no other word for it. And on top of it, I kind of object to the amount of energy and cash ...(unintelligible) that goes into fund raising for buildings. You know, he, again, put his reputation on the line to raise over $100 million for another monument for Second World War heroes while there are many veterans who are homeless, without health care. And I think the priority should be to take care of the veterans who are alive rather than build another edifice for those who are dead. So, really, who Bob Dole is, for me, represents a lot of what's wrong in our political culture.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Well, cashing in really goes right against the whole idea of public service. You know, it's one thing to give speeches; it's another thing to be pushing Viagra and--and pushing Pfizer, which is sort of another ma--pharmaceutical company that, in my opinion--that's another issue that I--I address in the book--also promotes, in many ways, anti-depressants for children, indirectly, not directly. But we now have anti-depressants for children, like Prozac, like Zoloft, being prescribed in incredible numbers; I mean, close to two million prescriptions last year. And they haven't been approved even by the FDA for pediatric use.

So I think that's another area where legislators are pulling back. They're not really, in my opinion, providing the kind of oversight they should be providing over an industry that spends millions of dollars on lobbyists and millions of dollars in direct and soft money contributions.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: To Washington, the first time I moved here in '86, shortly after I was married to Michael. And at the time, he was working at the Defense Department for...

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Michael Huffington. And then we moved to California and moved back here when he was elected to Congress in '92 and moved back to California after we were divorced in '97.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: I think it's--all those problems that I write about of the dominance of special interests, the prevalence of lobbyists have just become worse. I mean, we have statistics that show this phenomenal increase in lobbyists between '97 and '99 and then the revolving door--you know, the number of former members who become lobbyists, most recently Bob Livington, who's been very up front about it. You know, he can't wait to--for the year f--of lim--of--you know, that he's limited not to be able to directly lobby his former colleagues to expire so he can start doing it.

And I think it's just become worse, and my fear is that it will only get worse. It's--it's really like a bad relationship. It doesn't stay static. You know, it either gets better or it gets worse. And I think our--right now our relationship with government is just getting worse.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: What's causing it is that there hasn't been enough of an effort by the people to change it. I really d--think it's very hard for those inside the system to change the system. John McCain is making a valiant effort, and his victory in New Hampshire is, I think, obviously going to give him the megaphone to address these issues on an even broader scale. But he's hated by the establishment. I'm--I have a feeling that Mitch McConnell would rather see Gore in the White House than John McCain, that deep is the hatred. And that's not accidental. I mean, it's also not accidental that there have been numerous campaign finance reform bills, and nothing has passed.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: In '94.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Yes.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Yes. He spent close to $30 million.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Of his own money, yes. I think his children should sue him, don't you think, for squandering their inheritance?

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Well, at the time he was doing that, I was really--it was my first sort of exposure to a big campaign from the inside. I mean, in fact, a lot of my views were formed during his campaign. I don't think I would have reached these conclusions as fast if I hadn't seen how a major campaign is run. And I think Michael's campaign was typical, you know, neither worse nor better than the average campaign: taken over by consultants and pollsters, where decisions are made based on the polls, based on what's going to bring the--the opponent's approval ratings down and all those decisions that you see being made by campaigns every day.

And it's--at the time, of course, you know, I wanted my husband to win. I also, though, was really troubled by the way campaigns were run. And increasingly after he lost and after I started addressing these issues more in my column, I saw how campaigns had really become demolition derbies, where nothing mattered except winning. And, I mean, I would hear that again and again within Michael's campaign. You know, `After he wins, he can do this or that or he can say this or that, but not now, you know, because if he doesn't win, then he can't do anything.' So that always becomes the excuse for pandering, for not really running a campaign that's based on trying to create a consensus around an issue, even if that consensus does not exist yet in the polls.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Well, I remember that everybody--everybody in his life tried to dissuade him from running: his parents, me, his friends, everybody. Everybody felt it was premature; that he had just been in Congress for a term, and it seemed premature to everybody. A--but he decided to do it, and once he decided to do it, sort of everybody rallied around.

My--what I particularly did in--during his campaign, something which I had done during his congressional race, and this was to--to try to make visiting places that dealt with those most in need in their communities part of my own schedule because while I started doing that in Santa Barbara, where he first run, it was an incredible eye-opener. Of course, Santa Barbara is one of the most idyllic and wealthy areas in our country, and yet there was still so much poverty and homelessness and suffering that was really hidden from the big estates in Montecito and from the sort of public image of Santa Barbara, and the same was true all around California.

And so I made a point of making that part of--of my schedule, and now I think that candidates should make that part of their schedule. I mean, in New Hampshire, you know, there are 6,000 homeless. There are transition houses. There are homeless sleeping under the bridges. But how much coverage did we have of that race, and did you see any pictures of the homeless? Did you see any candidates visiting those--visiting those shelters? No.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: No.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Yes, I did. I did while Michael was running and while he was in Congress. I did consider myself a member of the Republican Party. Now I consider our two-party system broken, and I'd like to see third and fourth and fifth parties growing up. After all, we have many varieties of everything, except political parties, in this country. And I know that the Reform Party isn't exactly a model of a third party, but there are going to be a lot of growing pains in--in creating a system that goes beyond this duopoly that we have now.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Since--I became a mother in '89 and then an American citizen, I think, the next year.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: In Athens, Greece.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: I stayed in Athens until I was 17, and then I moved to England. I went to Cambridge, where I studied economics, and actually spent most of my time there debating at the Cambridge Union. I--that's where--I mean, I started being appalling, you know, not being able to speak with my accent being even heavier than it is now. But I--I just--I was so moved by the spectacle of debating and moving people's minds through words that I was determined to learn. And I sort of persevered, and I would wait and speak at every debate. Sometimes they would call on me at midnight, and I really learned from some of the greatest speakers in--in England at the time.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Oh, yes, they really did. In fact, at the time when I was growing up, you could choose to go through a classical education, even at high school, or a sort of practical education. So mine was an entirely classical education, which is why I'm still bad at math, but I--it meant Latin and Greek and really studying Plato and Aristotle and--and the play--the great Greek playwrights. And it was, I think, a great grounding.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Yes, yes, we would.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Uh-huh. Absolutely. Yeah. No, they--there's tremendous pride in growing up in Athens, despite all the pollution.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: I have the most extraordinary mother. My parents divorced when I was 10. I'm still very close to my father, but my mother is the sort of rock of Gibraltar in my life. She still lives with us. She helps me bring up my two daughters. And at the time, she's entirely self-taught, but she can sit here and discuss Nietzche and Sharpenauer with you. And she speaks four languages and she--but more important than that, she is a sort of--she's a mother to everybody. Now at home, you know, you cannot--if you came into her house, you could not leave without sitting down and trying what she had just cooked, even if you are the Federal Express deliveryman. She'd say, `Come in, sit down. Have something to eat.' So she creates this sort of tribal feeling around our home.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Yes. My dad was a journalist. He was, in fact, publishing an underground newspaper during the occupation of Greece by the Germans. And he was arrested and spent the war in a concentration camp. And he met my mother in a sanitarium when she was recovering from TB, and he was recovering from the concentration camp. And so he was a journalist who would start newspapers that would fall. So--so he would make some money, then he would invest in--in--in a newspaper. The newspaper would last for a few months. And so then we would have no money.

So my--I had this sort of precarious existence of sort of no money, then some money, then no money, and then--a lot of sort of insecurity. I still remember the days when I would stay up at night listening to my parents while they were still together, and that is one of the reasons where it all came apart, because it was hard to--as my mother says now, to live with him sort of trying to fulfill this dream of having a newspaper.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: His politics were all, really, very much formed by the war and by his experience, so--so they were very sort of pro-freedom, you know, a--against--very much, for example, against the Greek dictators when they took over Greece in '67. So it was--it was his experience during the war that formed them more than anything.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: That was really my mother. You know, I--I just remember just reading magazines and seeing Cambridge. I knew nothing about it, and I just thought, `Wouldn't that be great to go there?' And--and she said to me, `We'll make it happen.' You know, she was somebody who wanted to--to just make your dreams happen, and at the same time, she unconditionally loved you. So when you failed, she still loved you. So you felt you could try because she would still love you if you didn't succeed.

And so I went to the British consul in Athens, and I started taking my GCs, which is what you need to get into an English university, and then I--we went to London. She borrowed money. She would always borrow money. That's why I have a thing about paying down the debt, because I think sometimes you--you need debt to sort of get to the next stage in your life, and then you pay down. So that's what she did. She borrowed money, she got me to London, where I had to take the special entrance exam for Cambridge.

And I remember when we were waiting for the results getting this telegram which said, `Awarded Gerton.' Gerton was the college I went to, Gerton Exhibition. And we didn't know what that meant. That was a scholarship that I got. And it was just one of the greatest moments in my life, and it definitely changed my life.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: I was there for three years. That's wh--that's how long it takes in--at Cambridge to get a BA. And then two years later, provided you stay out of jail, they give you an MA. This is just a peculiarity of the Oxbridge system. They--I'm sure it's not true anymore, but at the time, it was supposed to be so much superior to any other college that--that you would automatically get an MA after your BA, even without any additional work.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: In economics.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: After that, in my third year at Cambridge, when I was president of the Cambridge Union, the debating society, I organized, as is the tradition at Cambridge, a farewell debate when I spoke. And the--the topic was--in favor of sort of bringing some more balance to the feminist movement. My theme was that you don't have to throw--throw the baby out with the bathwater; you know, that, yes, women should have equal pay and equal opportunity and be able to do everything they want, but we should also equally value women's choice to be a mother and a wife.

And at the time, of course, that was very controversial. It was in the early '70s when the only woman idealized was the woman with the attache case. So that debate was televised, and Jim Enger's publisher wrote to me and asked me if I would write a book on the views expressed in the debate. And I wrote back and I said, `I can't write. I'm going to Harvard.' I had a place to go to the Kennedy School of Government. And the publisher s--wrote back and said, `Do you have lunch?' And he invited me to lunch, and he offered to subsidize me modestly for a year. And he said, you know, if it turns out that you can't write,' he said--I lost, whatever it was 2,000 pounds--`and you can go to Harvard a year later.'

So I did that. I wrote that book, which was my first book, called "The Female Woman," which Random House published here and which was translated in 70 languages. And suddenly, at the age of 24, I had my mid-life crisis because I--I suddenly was financially independent for the first time in my life, and I had all these offers to do more books on women and to do shows on women. And...

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Arianna Stassinopoulos.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Mm-hmm.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: So then I stayed in London, and I did journalism. And I wrote my second book. I--instead of writing any more on women, because I felt I had nothing more to say on the subject, I wrote a book which nobody wanted to publish and which was rejected by 36 publishers.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Oh, yeah, I did count them. It was finally published here by a publisher who has since gone bankrupt. I hope not because they published my book, Stein & Day. And that book, in a way, is a precursor of this new book. In England, it was called "The Other Revolution." Here, it was called "After Reason." But it was basically about the bankruptcy of political leadership in the West since the war. Living in London at the time, I had more English examples than American examples, but I remember a chapter on Harold MacMillan, who you remember had coined that famous phase--phrase, `You never had it so good.'

And after the election, there was this cartoon in Punch of MacMillan surrounded by refrigerators and washing machines and looking around saying, `Thank you, guys. We won the election.' And it was really very much the theme today of the prosperity--you know, all politicians talking about our prosperity, as though this is the only thing that matters in a democracy.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Yes.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Definitely.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: It started--I gave a speech here at--in Washington at the National Review conference, and the title of my speech was: Can Conservatives Have A Social Conscience?

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Right.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: And what I argued was that it was about time that conservatives began to focus on the biblical admonition to care for the least among us; that this is the true political morality. It's not sexual morality. It's not gay rights or the attack on gay rights or abortion, but the real political morality is what are we doing for those left behind? And that was the theme of my speech, and you carried it. I'm sure you personally made that decision, Brian.

And so I got a call from Newt Gingrich, whom I didn't know, saying, `I saw your speech.' He said, `And I really agree with what you said. This is going to be our new agenda. I want to stress those issues of overcoming poverty and the moral imperative of that, and I want you to come and speak to our congressional class in--during our retreat at Princeton.' So that's what I did.

And so I really believed that he meant it because why would he pick up the phone to tell me that? And so when he became speaker and he gave that great speech when he first became speaker, saying that, `The moral imperative of overcoming poverty'--I'm paraphrasing--`is greater than balancing the budget,' I thought, `Great.' You know, `This is going to transform the Republican Party and, indeed, transform American politics.' And then over the next few months, it was a gradual process of disillusionment.

It was very clear that he didn't mean it. Suddenly the main issue became Medicare, and the reason why Medicare became the main issue is because that was the only way he could balance the budget. And I had a few conversations with him like that, and he would always say, `Well, you have to handle this first, and then we're going to deal with these issues of poverty and all those things.' And it never happened, and so my columns became increasingly more critical. And, finally, I wrote a column, which was sort of a breaking point, in which I criticized him and Bill Bennett for criticizing the Clinton administration for losing the drug war. Having said for years that we cannot win the war on poverty from Washington, suddenly why could we win the war on drugs from Washington?

And I got a handwritten note from Gingrich saying, `Your column is strategically counterproductive'--not wrong, but `counterproductive,' which I thought sounded very Stalinist. And he added, `What good does it do to take on your friends six weeks before the election?' And at that point, I knew that there was really no relationship left, and I became increasingly harsher in my criticism of him and calling on his res--calling for his resignation and very jubilant when he did resign.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Not often enough and that's really why John McCain has been so refreshing, except when it comes, for example, to the--what he said about the Confederate flag, which he called a--an offensive symbol and in 48 hours he called a symbol of heritage. So there's something about the system that even the best within the system find themselves pandering in a transparent way. And that's why I now have come to the conclusion that it will take a movement like it took the civil rights movement. It will take a movement, a grassroots movement, to change the wind. And when we change the wind, then the politicians will put their finger up and it will be blowing in a different direction.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Eight.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Mondays and Thursdays, twice a week.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Just about a hundred papers.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: No, I just do different...

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Yeah.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: I live in Los Angeles and I have an apartment in Washington, and I'm here every couple of weeks.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: I actually have already dedicated a book to both my daughters. I dedicated a book called "The Fourth Instinct" to both Christina and Isabella, so this time we had a family conference and decided that I would dedicate this book to Christina and the next book to Isabella.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Christina is 10 and Isabella's eight.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Christina is really interested in politics. She was v--very excited about John McCain winning. In fact, I was on the phone every hour to her from New Hampshire giving her blow-by-blow accounts. And she--she has met John McCain's children when we visited them in Arizona, so she wanted to know what they thought, so, `Had I talked to them? How were they feeling?'

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Isabella is--is my little Zorba the Greek. You know, she's--she embraces life and sort of life embraces her back. You know, she's joyful in a--in a--in an almost sort of permanent way. And she's still very much the baby even though she's now eight. But I think we're trying to keep her the baby.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Right now, with the book and the columns I write right now, are all part of this movement building. That's why we are launching the book in conjunction with television and radio ads, which show ordinary people taking action. Like, my favorite television ad shows an old lady who says, `I'm now retired, so I have plenty of time on my hands so I decided to overthrow the government and I'm starting by refusing to talk to pollsters.' She says, as I believe, that polling has dominated our political life. And there's nothing we can do about our leaders' addiction to polling, but there's something we can do as citizens. We can hang up on pollsters and drive down the response rate to even more ludicrous levels. It's already hovering between 20 percent and 30 percent, in many cases. And it's almost a kind of small civil disobedience step that we can do something that will make the sort of random digit dialing on which polling results are based less effective, less--less correct.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: I never had any doubt that democracy was the best system to--to have. The question is: When I--when did I decide that our system here is not working, that there is a crisis in democracy? I think that's really what we need to prove and what we need to convince people is the case. But when you have two-thirds of eligible voters not participating in an election, as was the case in 1998, that means that 115 million Americans eligible to vote chose not to. That, to me, is a crisis in democracy. The two parties don't really care because, frankly, they're--it's easy for them to manipulate a smaller electorate and with this customized campaigns, targeted campaigns--I write a sort of satirical column predicting that maybe in 300 years from now there'll be just one voter left, and George Bush the XX will be fighting for this vote against whoever is on the other side. And that sounds like an Or--Orwellian nightmare, but it's--it's really the trend. It's towards lower and lower turnout. And what is even more disturbing is the fact that younger people are voting at lower and lower rates. And the poor, which is always the case, of course, are voting in--in much smaller percentages. So as a result, we see that public policy is being effected tremendously.

I mean, why--why are we talking about prescription drugs for seniors, even though two-thirds of them already have them, instead of talking about prescription drugs and, indeed, health insurance for the millions of children that don't even have health insurance, because children don't vote, don't have lobbies?

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Mm-hmm.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Well, Judge Judy has a tremendous following. And her--that statement, which she made in Australia, maybe she didn't think that it would--it would actually reach us here, w--says something much more than just about Judge Judy. It--it says something about the way we treat the homeless. It--it says something about Mayor Giuliani deciding to round up homeless people from their shelters because of some minor violations in the middle of a cold night. It says something about the fact that the homeless, the addicted have become the invisible people in our society. And it says something that is really at the heart of my book, that we have become two nations. And that nation of the homeless and the addicted is not part of our national political conversation. When the president stands up at the State of the Union and says, `The state of our union is stronger than it has ever been,' he's only talking about one nation.

In fact, I thought this was a chilling, hubristic statement. And we're going to pay for that, because the neglect of that other nation has been going on for so long and now it is really, by both parties--you know, when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, you had front-page stories in The New York Times about homelessness. Now we are beginning to see that again, but for years we didn't. In fact, the Village Voice did an analysis, a comparative analysis of the coverage of homelessness in the Reagan years compared to the Clinton years. Homelessness has been unchanged, according to the Conference of Mayor's report, but the coverage of it, our response to it has been changed.

In fact, I say in the book that if you wanted to do something about the poor, put a Republican in the White House--not because he will do anything more about the poor, but suddenly those on the left would find their voices again and start criticizing the neglect.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: It is really a very visceral reaction. I mean, that moment of what I call compassionate conversion for me happened in--in '91, while I was campaigning in Santa Barbara for Michael, and I made a point of going and visiting these places left out.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: I don't really know what first got me to do that. I mean, at the beginning, it may have been just part of what wives do--comp--campaign wives do, but then it became what I wanted to do more than anything. I wanted to learn about it. I started getting in touch with people and groups who had made that their lives' work. They're--they're really my heroes now. I mean, there are people out there in the trenches who are doing such incredible work day in and day out and really from hand to mouth. I mean, that is what I find is so troubling, that they--these people know how to turn lives around. They shouldn't also be expected to know how to fund-raise, you know? These are different skills. And now we have really a different model of how we can take care of the poor. It's not the great society model of big federal government programs. It's really identifying what works on the ground and then using government to leverage these projects up, you know, to take them to market, as they say, to provide them with the funding that they need so they can really do the work. It's a very different model and it should be put into practice. This is really the great opportunity with all our prosperity, but it's not a major item on our agenda.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: You know, people do define me as a conservative. I'm--I think that if you consider Teddy Roosevelt a conservative, I would call myself a Teddy Roosevelt conservative. After all, he was the architect of a lot the progressive reforms, the anti-trust, pro-labor reforms, that we're still benefiting from. He was the one who talked about the dangers of predatory wealth. So conservativism and the Republican Party, once upon a time, used to be the party of reform, even wi--even without having to go back to Abraham Lincoln.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Oh, I had seen a lot of wealth before. I mean, I was around wealthy people before and I--and my books had made a lot of money. My biographies, especially, of Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso, so I--I was sort of independently wealthy by then.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: There are--there is in some, but what I saw in the wealthy community--and, in fact, that's something which is another sort of crusade of mine--is that a lot of that money goes to three things. It goes to prestigious educational institutions like Harvard. It goes to teaching hospitals, so rich people can always get a kidney, if they need one. And it goes to art museums. It goes to culture. And all the things are great, but I personally believe that our first responsibility is to give back to those mired in poverty. And that takes many forms, so using it--it as a catch-all phrase, you know, it--it includes education, health, addiction, violence, everything, all the dysfunctions of society. And after that, we can give to everything else we love, whether it's our old school at Harvard or the art museum.

In fact, what I'm proposing is--is ca--tithing, to bring back tithing; that everybody who can afford it gives 10 percent of their income, earned and unearned, to poverty fighting. Beyond that, if they want to give to the opera or the museum, great. And, in fact, you know this late '60s, Michael Kinsley puts out this list of the 16 most charitable people of--I wrote a column criticizing it because it did not make any distinctions between those who gave--for example, Mondavi gave to the Mondavi Institute for the Study of Wine and Art, you know--that's a very self-referrential extension of his business. And those who really give to education, especially elementary education or to the poor in--broadly defined. And then he asked me to--to actually take the list and create criteria of minuses and pluses, depending on what people give to. So that--there's a lot we can do as a culture to promote a certain kind of giving, which is the giving that we most need, and yet, we have least of.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Well, it really--it really works both ways. I've also made some great new friends in the poverty-fighting movement, like Jim Wallis, the editor of the Sojourners magazine and the convener of the Call to Renewal, which is a--a call from the faith-based community to overcome poverty. It's a national movement that is having a tremendous impact. And--and there are many people like that whose names you may not have heard but who are working in the trenches who have become my friends with whom--and--and allies. I consider them allies in this--in this work.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: I wanted to take one industry--an--and I chose the drug industry--to show how contributions to politicians have affected policy and have affected our lives in so many insidious ways. And let me just give you a couple of examples. We're spending billions of dollars every year on the drug war. No politician has the guts to say that the drug war has failed, that it has filled our jails with non-violent drug offenders, disproportionately African-American and other minorities. We actually now have two million people in American jails. That's more than they have in China. When I first read that that's more than they have in China, I really didn't believe it. I had to sort of do a Lexis/Nexis search to establish that it was really true. And that's a result of the drug war. And yet, no politician is going to address it and look at the hypocrisy, though, of overdrugging our children with legal drugs, especially mood-altering drugs, like Prozac, and not seeing the continuum between prescribing legal drugs to our children so that they become incapable of really managing their emotions and the roller-coaster that life often is and then saying to them, `We can medicate you, but you cannot take illegal drugs. No to drugs.' It doesn't make any sense. This is a continuum.

There are studies being done now at Berkeley that show, for example, that children who've been on Ritalin for extensive periods of time are more likely to use cocaine, but politicians are not going to touch that. In fact, when I started writing about this in my column and I needed some information from the FDA, which was not available to journalists, I tried to get a member of Congress on the FDA Oversight Committee. And I got responses again and again, `Arianna, I'm sorry, I can't touch it. Eli Lilly is a big contributor.' I mean, literally, I would get that...

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Eli Lilly makes Prozac.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Pfizer.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Tremendous amount. A tremendous amount. I mean, I have this direct evidence. In the end, I got one member of Congress, Congressman Dennis Kucinich from Cleveland, who agreed to write to the FDA. We got some very important information about what was happening there, the attempts to make Prozac approved for pediatric use, which it isn't yet. And he has become a great ally in this battle, but most people in Congress won't touch it.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: That's the other thing--the White House Conference on Mental Health. If truly we have two-thirds of Americans suffering from some kind of mental illness, I mean, we should--we should declare a crisis, a kind of state of emergency. But this is like the--the definition of mental health and mental illness is so driven by the drug industry. You know, there's one thing to consider a schizophrenia, man--manic depression mental illness, and it's another thing to consider common garden depression mental illness. I mean, we all go through depression. I mean, that's part of life. And I think there's a real--it's very unfortunate when the political establishment--in that case, both the president, Mrs. Clinton, the vice president and Mrs. Gore were there--basically lend their own credibility to what is ultimately in the best interests of the drug industry.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: I'm looking for wh--how did they get--how--where did that number come from? I mean, that's a...

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Yes. It came from a minor study from a Florida university with a minor, tiny sample. And yet, that number, 13.7 million children suffering from mental illness, is now being used as the gospel. Since that, I've--I've received press releases from members of Congress saying, `13.7 million children are suffering from mental illness. Therefore, we must do X and Y.' And that's why I thought it was amazing that the people who put together that conference could not give me a source for that number.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: No, because she is obviously a politician. She was a politician through and through. In fact, she was a good old boy. It proved that you don't have to be a man to be a good old boy. She was really very much part of that group that is funded by Dwayne Andreas and--the head of Archer Daniels Midland, which is another story about the corruption of our system, the way, you know, he funds politicians, the--the media. And as a result, when his own executives were found guilty of price fixing in Chicago, yes, it was reported in the papers, but it was hard to see it being covered anywhere else in the media.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Right. They get...

Ms. HUFFINGTON: They get $600 million a year of what taxpayers pay towards the ethanol subsidy. So when--you had even Bill Bradley who had been against ethanol subsidies when he was in the Senate changing his mind in order to run in Iowa. You see again how untouchable this thing has become--the ethanol subsidy, which is a huge boondoggle. There's absolutely no justification for it. It is not in the public interest remotely, and yet, the only candidate running for president who has dared be against it is John McCain. And he didn't participate in Iowa.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Well, it's the--another sort of pet peeve of mine that I--I write a lot about in the book is the abuse of language. The Orrin Hatch abuse is minor compared to the manipulation of language that we've seen so much of in the last year. Orrin Hatch tends--tends to use the royal `we'. And others like Steve Forbes or Pat Buchanan use the third person, like Pat Buchanan will do this, `Pat says,' or `Steve Forbes will never leave this race,' or whatever. And for--for me, this are just devices to sort of distance yourself from what you're saying, and, therefore, to distance yourself from your audience.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Well, direct mail has become, you know, a huge way to sort of not only raise money but criticize your opponent sort of a little bit under the radar screen because it's not on TV, and, therefore, the media may not catch onto it quickly. For some reason, I am on many politicians' direct mail list. So I get Republicans', Democrats' direct mail. And I also have now friends--because I started writing about it--who send me their direct mail. And one such friend sent me a letter she received from Jim Rogan's wife about Jim Robin's--I think it was--43rd birthday, saying, `You know, you're such a good friend of ours, your friendship means so much to us. And I want you to be part of Jim's birthday and--and could you please send us $43 or any amount, you know?'

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Sixty-three dollars, right.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: And I found it really appalling that--especially this family values politicians would exploit their families and something personal like a birthday as another fund-raising tool. On top of it, they barely knew this woman. She was a booker on "Politically Incorrect," and yet, you had all this fake intimacy. You know, `How much your friendship means to us.' And that is another example of this abuse of language, this...

Ms. HUFFINGTON: It does work.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: It works because it gives the impression of intimacy. It is--it is this kind of phony friendliness that works unfortunately. But the fact that it works doesn't mean it should be continued.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: The columns that I write about drugs and children get an enormous amount of feedback from parents and teachers. The column that I wrote urging Warren Beatty to run for president got an enormous amount, thousands of e-mails. And the...

Ms. HUFFINGTON: He didn't do it because in the end, he--he didn't feel that the ridicule that he would come under would allow his message to get through. The reason why I thought he should run is not because I believed he had any chance of winning but because I felt he could have the megaphone and he could get attention for those issues of poverty, of America becoming two nations and because he is a storyteller. I don't know if you've see "Bulworth." But that is a very, very compelling movie. And we need storytellers. We need leaders who can sort of bring us around the campfire and tell us the story of where America is now, not just where the Dow Jones is now. That's the story we know very well but the story of where we are now and really call us to great things. There's a tremendous reserve of idealism, I believe, in--in all of us.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Disraeli is a favorite leader of mine because he understood, as he said himself, that in order to govern, you first have to change the hearts and minds of people. And at the time, he did it through novels. He wrote "Sybil," a novel which really transformed the way the English looked at poverty in Victorian England. And he coined the term `the two nations,' which again makes nonsense of these distinctions between right and left because he was a Tory, he was a conservative in our terms. And yet, he made that healing of the rift between the two nations his primary goal.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Not at the moment. Right now, I really--who knows down the road--but right now, I really believe that helping being part of this movement that is happening--of activism and of compassion and of taking back our government--is something where I can be more effective.

Ms. HUFFINGTON: Thank you.