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Rachel Maddow, Anchor Woman

Out political commentator Rachel Maddow is flying high as the newest sensation in cable news talk. And if it seems like you can’t talk her down, that’s because she’s already well grounded.

Just days into her new role as host of her own primetime news and commentary program on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow considers the whirlwind of the first week in an intensified spotlight.

“It’s been fun,” says Maddow, speaking with AfterEllen.com by telephone from the Manhattan office of Air America Radio, where she turns in an evening host shift before heading to her primetime anchor’s chair at MSNBC. “Busy and long days, and a lot of anxiety. But actually doing the show, actually being on TV, thus far, has been a hoot.”

That homespun assessment reflects the well regarded charms of Maddow. Strikingly intelligent, disarmingly polite and endearingly self-deprecating, she almost sounds like someone who just happened to step into a meteoric trajectory as the breakout media star during this once-in-our-lifetimes political campaign season.

Almost.

Starting this past spring, Maddow, 35, has ascended from a spot as occasional fill-in host for MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann to headlining her own hour-long program, The Rachel Maddow Show, on the bad-boyish cable news channel that’s also home to Chris Matthews. Since her show premiered on September 8 in the critical 9 p.m. time slot, it has been drawing strong ratings, particularly among the coveted 25-54 year-old demographic. Not bad for someone who says she “stumbled” into broadcasting when friends encouraged her to audition for a radio station contest in western Massachusetts about a decade ago. These days, she splits her time between the Bay State and the Big Apple with her long-term partner, artist Susan Mikula.

Though the California native may not have foreseen her current profession in her Stanford application essay, or her studies at Oxford as the first openly gay American Rhodes Scholar, how does she classify her role, particularly in an era when the word “change” seems as popular among journalists as it is among aspiring presidents?

“Uh, I don’t know,” she says in a mock dopey voice, which indicates that she full well knows the answer.

“I think of myself as a broadcaster,” Maddow says. “When I have to write my occupation, that’s always what I put down. I make media. But I happen to make it about the news. And I happen to be a regular person who is happy to tell you what my thoughts are on the news that I’m bringing you. You can call that a pundit. You can call that a newsperson. You can call that a news anchor. I don’t know. I just think of myself as me.”

Whatever you call it, with no shortage of global calamities spawned by human folly, Maddow is emerging as a pitch-perfect voice in these cursedly interesting times. Part tenure-track professor, part concerned citizen, she appears, above all, like her generation’s best sketch of a patriot. While wielding left-leaning political views, she impresses as someone who values the civic enlightenment of her viewers above shock-jock partisanship.

Witness her civil exchanges with the conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, whom she calls “my fake uncle” in the new “It’s Pat” segment, alluding to the early 90s Saturday Night Live skit about an androgynous character. Buchanan, who in that same era clamored for a Republican culture war against gay people, spars regularly with the openly lesbian commentator, without acrimony.

The same spirit of good sportswomanship and sheer delight of argument pervades the nightly “Talk Me Down” segment, in which guests of varying political persuasions attempt to counter Maddow’s emotional reaction to an issue like offshore oil drilling, or the bailout of the financial crisis. “I don’t get mad because somebody has a different perspective than me,” she explains. “I get mad at people who are screwing things up in the country, and screwing things up in the world. But if you disagree with me about even serious issues, and you’re willing to debate them with me in a civil way without being insulting, I’m going to enjoy that conversation.”

If she sounds like an ideal elected official, voters, please note that Maddow is not interested in a write-in candidacy on November 4.

She brims with enthusiasm and appreciation for her current gig, and sounds convinced, if not downright humbled, that she is the luckiest person in the world.

“I have a really, really, really good job,” she says. “I get paid to talk about the news, and talk about politics. A lot of us talk about the news and politics all the time, or think about it all the time, and don’t get paid to do it. I feel very lucky to be employed in this job, with these platforms, at this time.”

 

Nor is the distinction of being the first out lesbian to host a prime-time news or political commentary show on American television lost on Maddow, though she at first reframes the question in a more general way.

“It’s a pretty big responsibility to be on TV, or to be on the radio,” she says. “To be doing national broadcasting about the news is a pretty weighty responsibility regardless of those things. So I think I take it seriously in the broadest sense.”

When pressed lightly, however, she does offer her specific thoughts on her historic achievement, and what it means for women, and men, in the LGBT community.

“I think the responsibility that we have as gay Americans,” she says, “is to the extent that we can – and we ought to be really ambitious about the extent to which we can – we have to be out.”

“That’s the thing that we owe the people who came before us who are the pioneers, and that’s the thing we owe the next generation of gay people in terms of clearing the way and making life easier for them. I think that there is a moral imperative to be out, and I think that if you’re not out, you have to come to an ethical understanding with yourself why you are not. And it shouldn’t be something that is excused lightly. I don’t think that people should be forced out of the closet, but I think that every gay person, sort of, ought to push themselves in that regard. Because it’s not just you. It’s for the community and it’s for the country.”

Of course, simply being a woman in a prominent nightly news position is rare enough, which ought to give Maddow a unique perspective on the substantial role that women, for better of for worse, have played in the 2008 presidential race.

When asked for her thoughts, she pauses for a moment, and then unloads.

“One specific thing that I think has been interesting in this campaign is the use of ‘sexism’ and ‘sexist’ as an epithet in completely inappropriate ways,” she says. “The Republicans’ strategy, in putting Sarah Palin on their ticket, and the way they have presented her, and they way they have structured their political fortifications around her, has been to cry sexism at any criticism of her, to cry sexism at any political glance toward her. What they are doing is the form of sexism that you see in ostentatious chivalry.”

Not that Maddow is worried about the honor of America’s young women, or AfterEllen.com readers.

“I think that young women are smart and I think that one of the things that young women have been very good at is calling people on their anti-feminist bulls–t,” she says. “So I look to young women for leadership in terms of pointing out the difference between being a woman and being a feminist. The difference between sexism and chivalry, I should say.”

Speaking of gender gymnastics, one wonders how Maddow feels about her growing status as a thinking-woman’s sex symbol.

True to form as a self-described “infrastructure nerd” who “dresses like a first-grader” in t-shirts, 501s and “skateboard sneaks,” she seems genuinely unfazed by the attention.

“It’s really flattering,” she says, “and it’s really nice that people would say nice things about what I look like, but, in terms of what it means in my life, I don’t think about it too much.”

Without addressing the potential intellectual element of her appeal, she proceeds with a discussion about physical appearances, and the trade-off required for TV.

“I feel like in terms of what I look like, I’m working in a very visual medium for the first time in my life, and I’m just sort of trying to get by in terms of the basic, the minimum that I need to do visually in order to be allowed to be on television,” she says. “And so I put on the suit, so that I can go on TV. I let the makeup ladies put makeup on me, which they do to their own satisfaction. I don’t pay much attention to it.”

For the record, Maddow, who does not wear makeup in real life, dislikes very saturated lipstick colors.

The most controversial cosmetic of the campaign season aside, Maddow, who was introduced to politics as a teenage HIV/AIDS activist in the Bay Area, is driven to cover as many substantive issues as she can while she holds the job she calls a “golden opportunity.”

Once the presidential contest is decided – though Maddow half jokes that it could go beyond Election Day – she says, “I’m looking forward to having a broader palette of items to choose from in terms of the news of the day. I think that there’s a lot to expect in coming months from politics, but it’s a big, fascinating world out there.” She rattles off her concerns about North Korea, national security and a federal government that she calls “scuttled.”

“I think the next year of news, not just the next few months of the election, is going to be great,” she says.

Asked whom she would most like to interview over that time, the defense policy wonk unflinchingly responds, “Osama bin Laden. A, you’d want to interview him so that you could catch him. But B, if you could really talk to him, I think that he’s the great unknown in American politics. He’s the looming specter.”

Should Maddow accomplish that elusive feat, even if it finds her in some remote cave, her supporters in the LGBT community can be assured that she will get the message about their collective pride over her progress.

“I’ve received a lot of love from the gay community in terms of people being really supportive of me being out,” she concludes, “and appreciative of my success, and people cheering me on, and it’s really heartening. It makes me feel very grounded in the community, and I’m grateful. And so to everybody who’s ever cheered at the TV for me, I hear you.”

MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show airs weeknights at 9 p.m. ET. For more about Maddow, read our 2007 interview with her.

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