HUFFINGTON'S PRIOR PUNDITRY INFLUENCES HER CAMPAIGN'S TONE BLENDING BARBS
WITH CHARM, SHE ELUDES EASY LABELS

Los Angeles -- Arianna Huffington enters a windowless room that is a
near-perfect cube and sits down in the center on a chair. In this gray
cube, there is little else but a television camera pointed toward her. When
a technician closes the cloth-paneled door, the seams around it almost
disappear and she is hermetically locked inside the cube, alone facing only
the camera.

A little apprehensive in an interview earlier, she comes alive.

"Hi Daaaavid," she says in her silky Greek accent, speaking to the
unblinking eye of the camera but really to Republican Rep. David Dreier,
who is interviewing her for MSNBC. Huffington later jokes with Dreier about
trying to set him up with a wife.

Her TV chumminess with Dreier is somewhat disconcerting, since Dreier is
about to rip into her for not paying taxes. It's encounters like this --
the cocktail party banter combined with open criticism of the people she is
engaging -- that make it hard to pinpoint Huffington.

Is she an insider or an outsider? A pundit or a candidate?

As the only major female challenger in the Oct. 7 recall, Huffington has
been called seductive, irrational, charming, confounding, erratic. Running
as an independent, she has faced intense, mocking criticism, including an
attack by former Democratic operative Susan Estrich, who wrote she was
seeking "self- aggrandizement, attention -- at the expense of her kids."

Huffington has nominal support from voters, according to polls. So the
focus on her campaign can only be attributed to her own bipolar
relationship with the media establishment. Few people would weep for
Huffington, who can dish it out better than anyone, but now she gets to
feel what it's like to be a politician under scrutiny.

"It's been a combination of just amazing, inspiring experiences on the
campaign trail and a distortion of who I am that is unlike any other
distortion of any other candidate," Huffington said.

Huffington said sexism plays a part in how she's treated by the media and
political system.

"I am the only viable woman in the race and I think it is amazing that
there still hasn't been a woman as a chief executive. There is a
good-old-boy atmosphere when it comes to the governor's office."

Huffington's current problem is that she hasn't stopped talking or writing
about politics for more than a decade, which means there is a huge body of
work that can be compared to her political platform. She has been hit on
several fronts during the campaign for being a hypocrite.

Huffington thinks corporations are pigs feeding at the public trough and
should be denied special tax breaks, but ended up paying less than $800 in
federal taxes herself over the past two years. She said reporters failed to
mention she paid $98,042 in property taxes and $44,216 in payroll taxes
and, anyway, tax deductions for business losses are not the same as a
corporate tax loophole.

A more damaging revelation was Huffington's hiring of a campaign manager,
Dean Barkley, who lobbies on behalf of Lorillard tobacco, gambling and the
garbage industry. Gallons of ink have been used to print Huffington books
and columns railing against special interest lobbyists.

Now, she has only a meek defense for this.

"It surprised me and it troubled me," Huffington said. "Obviously if he had
been a lobbyist in California I would have asked him to leave. . . . He's a
lobbyist in Minnesota. He's also a reformer. He's been fighting for public
financing of campaigns and he helped elect an independent governor."

Others are questioning her association with John-Roger, founder of the
Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, whom some have likened to a cult leader.

She is being criticized for defending Proposition 187 in 1994, but saying
recently that she actually voted against it. She rails against special
interests but holds VIP fund-raisers and gives big donors extra access.

But the larger issue that appears to bother the political establishment has
been Huffington's political transformation over the years, from a so-called
Newt Gingrich Republican to someone who attacks both parties for ignoring
the poor and cowardly catering to special interests.

Huffington said the turning point came when she wrote a column in 1998
criticizing Republicans for failing in their war on drugs.

Gingrich, she said, "sent me back my column with a note in the margin that
said, 'this column is strategically counterproductive.' I've never talked
with him or seen him since."

Gingrich also wrote, "What good does it do to take on your friends two
months before the election?" Huffington still refers to some of her targets
as "friends," and describes in her book, "How to Overthrow the Government,"
an uncomfortable scene at a dinner party at the home of White House counsel
Boyden Gray where she realizes Rush Limbaugh's wife, Democratic political
strategist Bob Shrum and GOP Rep. Dick Armey are all in attendance.

"The repercussions of the opinions I expressed twice weekly in my column,"
she said, "were playing themselves out in the living room."

Environmental activist Laurie David, the wife of "Seinfield" co-creator
Larry David, said Huffington has based her beliefs on thorough research
over many years, written hundreds of columns and nine books, and now is
being pushed back by people she's offended politically.

"I think she is being completely marginalized by the opposition," David
said, "and I think it's because she's brilliant, because she's a woman,
because she has an accent, because she's a whistle-blower, and they don't
like that."

Huffington has formed an unusual alliance with Peter Camejo, a Green Party
candidate for governor. She has pledged to withdraw from the campaign and
give her support to Camejo if it appears closer to election day that he has
a real chance of winning. Alternatively, she has said Camejo will drop out
and support her campaign if she appears to have a shot at victory.

This week, Huffington is preparing to unveil her first television ad for
the campaign. Produced by Scott Burns, co-creator of the "Got Milk" ads,
the Huffington spot shows an ethnically diverse group of people in a
run-down neighborhood being drawn to a giant cube in the center of a
schoolyard. The cube carries the words "register to vote" and a voice-over
asks people to think outside the box.

Amid this populist message is the image of Huffington herself. She can
appear to be an elitist who moves in the highest circles of society and
counts among her friends prominent figures in the clubby world of West Los
Angeles intellectuals. She may drive a Toyota Prius hybrid car, but she
carries a Ferragamo bag and sips water from her Evian bottle through a straw.

Born in Athens in 1950, Huffington left for Cambridge University when she
was 17 and studied economics. She was president of the Cambridge Union
debating society. She wrote three books before she was 30, dated powerful
men, including now-Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, and wrote a biography of
artist Pablo Picasso.

Huffington has planned a fund-raiser for Sept. 9 that will include
comedians Al Franken, Bill Maher and Harry Shearer, and is co-chaired by
Dustin Hoffman, Christine Lahti and Harvey Weinstein. Donors who pay
$20,000 get to discuses strategy with Huffington on a hike and attend a
private VIP reception.

As she campaigns, Huffington is being trailed by documentary filmmaker Joan
Churchill, who has worked on films about rockers Courtney Love and Kurt
Cobain and serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Because Huffington travels with
only a few campaign aides, the hovering documentary crew adds a nicely
surreal touch.

How can a populist come from Brentwood by way of Cambridge? She said her
situation may be similar to that of the Roosevelts and the Kennedys, rich
families that devoted their lives to the poor, and she expects voters will
figure out she's not a fraud.

"The alternative, which is basically complete self absorption, is a tragic
life in my opinion," Huffington said. "I feel that the people whose
concerns I give voice to have a phenomenal B.S. barometer and they know
when you're for real."

Part of the intense scrutiny of Huffington comes because of her ex-husband,
Michael Huffington, the Texas oil heir, one-term Republican U.S.
representative and failed U.S. Senate candidate, whom she met at Ann
Getty's house in San Francisco in 1985.

Now, after a divorce in 1997, Michael Huffington is trying to undermine her
campaign by using their daughters as weapons and phoning reporters to
remind them of her past political positions as a way to supposedly expose
her hypocrisy. He did not return a call for comment.

But he recently told CNN that their oldest daughter has been devastated by
her decision to run for governor and moved out of her $7 million Brentwood
mansion.

Using that, Estrich wrote last week that Huffington put her ego over her
own children and now might have trouble making ends meet without child support.

The children, however, continue to inhabit the Brentwood house and
regularly see their mother. Huffington declined to comment about the
matter, saying "the most important thing is for my children not to have
their parents in a public feud."

As for Estrich, Huffington responded in her campaign Web log a day later:
"This kind of dirty politics is one reason why over 13 million Californians
didn't vote in the last election. People are sick and tired of campaigns as
demolition derbies."