"You burn out fast when you demagogue"

Tucker Carlson on why he doesn't like Karen Hughes, what makes Bill O'Reilly "dangerous" and the reasons he prefers CNN to Fox.

By Kerry Lauerman

Sep 13, 2003 | As the conservative host for a high-profile political debate show, the boyish, bow-tied Tucker Carlson is someone you'd expect to have a lot of critics. What is impressive, though, is the range of people carping about him. There are angry liberals, of course, like Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who, Carlson recounts, once called him "filled with hatred." But there are also conservatives, like House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, who complained to the New York Post that Carlson was "not a real Republican," after he assumed his "Crossfire" post -- an opinion echoed by Carlson's future co-host, the truly crotchety Bob Novak.

In his new book, "Politicians, Partisans and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News," Carlson settles a few of those scores and dishes on some of his contemporaries: Fox's Bill O'Reilly, as well as a variety of other politicians, media personalities and insiders such as the particularly pitiless CNN producer he memorably describes as "a middle-aged man with perfectly hairless arms." And he also reveals his own brush with the ultimate political scare in Washington's world of high-wire politics: A near-sex scandal that threatened to end his nascent broadcasting career. Recently, Carlson spoke to Salon by phone:

What does your CNN co-host Bob Novak think about the book?

I haven't talked to him about it. I think he loves it. I think he said that it was the best book he read all year.

Hmm. You "think" he said that.

I think he said that.

OK ... what was it like working with him after you learned he had complained that you weren't, what, conservative enough?

Right. Well, I am conservative enough. I'm not a Bush defender, particularly. I defend him when his actions intersect with my beliefs, but I'm not a partisan at all. I'm not interested in parties, in fact I'm opposed to party loyalty in principle. It sort of makes me sick, actually. So in that regard, I'm not a reliable defender of the White House. But I am certainly a reliable defender of broadly defined conservative principles.

I'm not particularly anti-drug, and I'm opposed to the death penalty as I am adamantly opposed to abortion. Arnold Schwarzenegger is anti-drug, pro-death penalty, pro-abortion. So I guess we're both conservatives? I don't know. All I know is I can only represent my own views, and there was this concern that I was secretly liberal.

But why?

It was McCain.

Payback for your coverage of McCain for the Weekly Standard?

I'm not sure it was really payback, but I liked McCain. And I would have voted for McCain for president happily, not because I agree with his politics; I never took McCain's politics seriously enough even to have strong feelings about them. I don't think McCain has very strong politics. He's interested in ideas almost as little as George W. Bush is. McCain isn't intellectual, and doesn't have a strong ideology at all. He's wound up sort of as a liberal Republican because he's mad at other Republicans, not because he's a liberal.

My attraction to John McCain had nothing to do with ideas at all, I just liked McCain very much as a man, and I was never embarrassed about saying that. And I think some people on the right took that as code for liberalism or something.

But partisans on both sides regard any independence as a threat, don't you think?

Yeah, well, I don't know if I ever rose to the level of threat, but clearly some thought that I was secretly liberal. But I've generally had an easy time. I've never felt the need to hide my beliefs, and they generally are pretty conservative.

OK, but back to Bob Novak ...

I never heard really much about it. My life doesn't intersect with Bob's directly very often. I've only seen him in person maybe three times in the last year.

You work alternating days.

Right. Bob's been around for a long time and I respect that. He's reported more stories than I ever will, and I respect that, too. We don't agree about everything -- I like Israel, for one thing -- but we don't need to agree on everything.

What about DeLay?

I don't think DeLay feels the need to apologize to a member of the press. I don't believe I've ever met Tom DeLay. Honestly? I'm not sure I've ever even seen Tom DeLay in person. He's got a high voice, doesn't he?

Possibly. What about your profile of George W. Bush in Talk in 1999? That had to be the most damaging profile of him yet written -- swearing like a truck driver, making fun of Karla Faye Tucker's death penalty appeals, mimicking her saying, "Don't kill me!" -- because of its high profile, and because of your access to him. Did that bring you flak from conservatives?

Well, it's always disconcerting when something you write is received in a way you don't expect. I have no problem hurting someone's feelings -- obviously, I work on "Crossfire" -- but when you don't expect to, it's disconcerting. As I put in the book, the day before I filed the piece my wife asked, "Aren't people going to think you're sucking up?" And that was my concern, that people would think it's a suck-up piece.

And the response from team Bush?

It was very, very hostile. The reaction was: You betrayed us. Well, I was never there as a partisan to begin with.

Then I heard that [on the campaign bus, Bush communications director] Karen Hughes accused me of lying. And so I called Karen and asked her why she was saying this, and she had this almost Orwellian rap that she laid on me about how things she'd heard -- that I watched her hear -- she in fact had never heard, and she'd never heard Bush use profanity ever. It was insane.

I've obviously been lied to a lot by campaign operatives, but the striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness.

They get carried away, consultants do, in the heat of the campaign, they're really invested in this. A lot of times they really like the candidate. That's all conventional. But on some level, you think, there's a hint of recognition that there is reality -- even if they don't recognize reality exists -- there is an objective truth. With Karen you didn't get that sense at all. A lot of people like her. A lot of people I know like her. I'm not one of them.

Did you suffer from it?

No, I don't think I suffered for it, really. It wasn't, in the end, that big a deal. I see Bush every year at the White House Christmas Party, and he's nice enough to me.

How do you place yourself with other TV conservatives? How do you feel when people mention you in the same list with, say, Sean Hannity?

I don't know much about Sean Hannity. I'm not offended. I don't think about my image all that much, so I'm not quite sure how I'm perceived. But I never say anything that I don't believe. If I felt the administration was right about something, I would go down swinging on behalf of that idea. And if I thought they were wrong I would say so.

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