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NATIONAL REVIEW June 19, 2000 Issue
Rosie O’Donnell, Political Activist
A celebrity and her platform.
By Jay Nordlinger, NR's managing editor
They call her the “Queen of Nice,” but she didn’t ask for the title, and she refuses to wear the crown. “I am not the Queen of Nice,” she says emphatically, indeed, angrily. She likes her TV talk show to be sweet and light, but “I have serious and strong views” — about Woody Allen, for example, who married his wife’s daughter (or something like that), and O. J. Simpson, who . . . well, we all know what he did. And she is very, very tough on conservatives. In fact, Rosie O’Donnell has become the celebrity who most inflames the Right. She has surpassed Barbra Streisand, the Baldwin brothers, and even Jane Fonda, who has apparently found religion. Whether she’s plumping for the Clintons, socking it to Rudy Giuliani, or leading the cry for gun control, Rosie is making conservatives choke. She is using the bully pulpit of her stardom with a vengeance. And, in some ways, she is the perfect expression of modern liberalism.
Of her fame, there is no doubt: It is dizzying. Walk into any supermarket, glance at the magazine rack, and there’s Rosie. (Bill Buckley once noted the impossibility of “Mr. Carson”; it had to be “Johnny.” So it is with Rosie.) She’s a movie star, a television personality who rivals the almighty Oprah, a stand-up comic, a Broadway entertainer, an author, and an industry. She has a Barbie doll made in her likeness (yes), and that ultimate stamp of celebrity: a Christmas album. Time magazine listed her as one of the 25 most influential people in the country. About her activism, Rosie says, “I have a responsibility as well as an opportunity to speak to millions of people on a daily basis. It’s sad that celebrities’ opinions are given so much weight, but they are, in the culture we live in.”
Politically speaking, she considers herself primarily a child-welfare advocate. “I always knew,” she says, “that if I were ever in a position to have an effect on society, I would use it to benefit kids.” Rosie herself had a rough upbringing, of the Frank McCourt variety. And she has certainly put her money where her mouth is, devoting millions of dollars to children’s charities, mainly through a foundation of her own devising. Her political heroes? That’s easy: Hillary Clinton and Marian Wright Edelman, stalwarts of the Children’s Defense Fund. (“I’m a devout follower of hers,” says Rosie of Edelman.) Her fondest dreams are thoroughly Hillaryesque: national health care and national day care—in addition, of course, to gun control.
ON A SOAPBOX
Shortly after her show began in 1996, Rosie revealed herself as a Democrat. She was a bit nervous at first. As she explained to Entertainment Weekly, “I thought, ‘Uh-oh: I guess there’s a reason Dave [Letterman] and Jay [Leno] never get into their political affiliations. I’m going to get letters from Republicans about this.’ Then I realized: ‘What Republicans are watching daytime television? They’re too busy trying to make more money than anybody else.’” Rosie has a certain tic about Republicans and money. Recently, she opined that her neighbors in Greenwich, Conn., “have too much money.” Rosie’s liberalism — heavy with emotion — tends to be a cartoon liberalism: Every Republican is a sniffy man in a top hat and limo, instructing his driver to run down any urchin he can spot.
Since her unveiling as a Super Dem, Rosie has been relentless. She decried Republican welfare reform, signed into law by President Clinton, as “literally heinous” (she still thinks so). She raised money for the Clinton-Gore reelection, knocking Republican heads as she went. For Hillary, her affection is unbounded. She told her friend Nora Ephron, in an interview for Redbook, “I wish that she were running for Senate as a divorcée, but I will support her” in any case. The First Lady has been on the Rosie show at least five times. At last fall’s “Broadway for Hillary” fundraiser, Rosie spilled acid on Mayor Giuliani, then the likely Republican nominee versus Hillary. She said that he looked like a Pez dispenser. She said that if he wrote a book, it would be called “It Takes a Village Idiot” (her material is usually not so worn). Worse, in a joke about a mainly black Broadway cast, she implied that Giuliani was a racist. Hillary expressed her thanks by calling Rosie “absolutely incomparable.”
The talk-show host wasn’t through with the mayor. In December, as the Senate race was getting hot, she used her show to attack Giuliani for his policies on the homeless (which Giuliani supporters would characterize as “tough love”). “He’s out of control, this guy!” said Rosie. “Sure, just, you know — arrest all the homeless people.” Then she flashed the mayor’s phone and fax numbers on the screen, inviting her fans to register their outrage. She threatened to take to the streets herself, to be arrested. Giuliani, not surprisingly, had a response: “There’s no question that she’s a political operative.”
But the crucial moment for Rosie had come earlier in the year, in April: Columbine. The lesson of the tragedy, she decided, was the evil of guns. In a fit of fury, she said, “Outlaw all guns, and put all gun owners in jail!” Prior to this awful event, she now explains, “I wasn’t immersed in the gun issue. Child advocacy was my thing. I didn’t know who Wayne LaPierre was [he’s head of the National Rifle Association]. I felt spiritually called to the table.” What Rosie means is this: “There’s a part of the Mass — I don’t attend now, but I used to, as a kid — that goes, ‘This is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are they who are called to His supper.’ And I thought, ‘Those kids are like the sacrificial lamb,’ and it called me to the supper.” Rosie vowed to take up gun control as a crusade. She also likes to cite a line from Les Misérables, being a Broadway maven: “If I speak, I am condemned; if I stay silent, I am damned.”
Not long after Columbine, Tom Selleck was a guest on Rosie’s show, and the two of them had a testy — indeed, bitter — exchange over the NRA and guns. It was a strange moment for daytime television, and it is now part of gun-debate lore. Here is a taste of what Rosie said that day: “I think the Second Amendment is in the Constitution so that we can have muskets when the British people come over in 1800. I don’t think it’s in the Constitution to have assault weapons in the year 2000.” On the heels of the fracas, Rosie faced a problem: It was pointed out that Kmart, for whom she did commercials, was a major retailer of guns. Did that make her a hypocrite? She was reluctant to give up the gig, as all of her earnings from the spots went to charity, but she did so at the end of the year, realizing that her position was untenable.
Rosie’s latest political performance was as “emcee” of the “Million Mom March,” the rally for gun control held in Washington. In a sign of true political arrival, she was interviewed by Cokie Roberts on This Week. She was, as she usually is, fluent and impassioned as she trotted out every gun-control canard in the book: 4,000 “children” killed per year by guns, 20,000 gun laws riddled with “20,000 loopholes,” the NRA “stranglehold over Congress,” the rarity of gun deaths in other countries, and so on. At the rally itself, she charged, “The NRA is buying votes with blood money.” Charlton Heston, for his part, had little recourse but to laugh her off as “Tokyo Rosie.”
RUMBLES LEFT AND LEFTER
As Rosie herself implied with her comment about Letterman and Leno, it’s unusual for a talk-show host — at least one of this sort — to wax political. Her predecessors, who are also her models and idols — Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, Dinah Shore — never did so. Neither did Johnny. Jack Paar, who preceded Carson on The Tonight Show, could be a jerk about politics, and a lucky thing, too, for it led to one of Bill Buckley’s most dazzling and popular essays: “An Evening with Jack Paar” (found in the Buckley collection Rumbles Left and Right). Buckley appeared on the show in 1962, and he so unnerved his host that the poor man went on a several-day tear against Buckley, grouping him with the Nazis and Communists, in that charming liberal way we’ve come to know so well. For his troubles, Paar received a congratulatory phone call from President Kennedy.
In more recent times, Oprah Winfrey — bigger than Paar ever was — has largely avoided politics, although she did clash with cattlemen over the safety of American beef. And we must not forget Phil Donahue — a total political beast who, himself, is a definer of today’s liberalism.
Many TV insiders believe that Rosie runs a risk with her politicking: There are millions of Americans — customers — who are bound to take offense. Does she worry? “I never enter it into the equation,” she says. Neither is she troubled by questions of equal time and balance. “I can understand the concern,” but, in the case of Giuliani, for example, “I don’t know that anyone from his campaign would have wanted to be on the show” (fat chance). “We did have the other side with Tom Selleck, as badly as that turned out. I don’t think either of us was particularly proud of that, but I think he was brave to come on and discuss the issue with me — and that is the other side.” Following Selleckgate, “three or four people [who were to be guests on the show] canceled, and one other person, a country-western singer, called me,” seeking reassurance that all would be peaceful.
In the year since Columbine, Rosie’s stance on guns has softened, and she has learned the language of pragmatism. “As a mother, my emotional response was, ‘Let’s get rid of all guns.’ But that’s not going to happen.” Sure, “in a perfect world, I would love it if we didn’t have any handguns, but that’s not what I’m striving for, nor is it attainable. That’s an extremist view.” She now says, “I’m not against someone having a gun, as long as it’s licensed, registered, and has a child-safety lock.” Furthermore, “I don’t think gun owners are the enemy. I don’t think they’re evil.” Charlton Heston has pledged, bearing a rifle aloft, “From my cold, dead hands.” Says Rosie: “I don’t want to take his gun from his cold, dead hands, or his warm, live ones. That’s not what we’re asking for.”
She stresses that her push for gun control is part of her overall effort to aid children. So, does she believe that the NRA cares less about young ones than she does? She pauses for a second, then answers, “I would say, maybe they care about their own kids. But not kids in general. The only life that is important to them is white, Republican life.” The gun industry, she continues, “has a vested interest in not being regulated,” but “we don’t have a financial interest, because we’re mothers.” She attributes no decent motivation whatever to the NRA. Its position, she asserts, “is based on financial gain, not on patriotism or love of children.”
On the day of her talk with National Review — May 25 — Rosie was all over the news: One of her bodyguards had applied for a gun permit in Greenwich. For conservatives, this was Christmas morning. Here was one of the nation’s most visible gun haters, apparently seeing to it that she herself was protected by a gun while campaigning to leave everyone else defenseless. (Rosie and her family have been the targets of threats, stemming, she believes, from her antigun stance.) The hypocrisy seemed stinking, blatant. Yet Rosie pleads innocent: “The security people who work in my home do not have guns. The statistic is that you’re three times more likely to be a victim of violence if you own a gun. That’s why I choose not to have them in my home. But in public places, my security people, who are off-duty policemen, have guns” — which, she holds, is another matter.
In her politics, she remains a Clintonite to the core, but she does have misgivings about the president: “I have severe disappointments in his personal ethics. I lost a tremendous amount of respect for him during [the Lewinsky affair], and it has not been recovered. I haven’t forgotten, nor will I. But that’s a code of shame on him, not on Hillary.” Did she lose any respect at all for Hillary, what with her wild charges of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” and so on? No way. “I believe she believed her husband. I don’t believe for one minute that she sat on the Today show [where the First Lady alleged the “conspiracy”] knowing the truth of that situation. I believe her husband lied to her, as he did to everyone else, and that she found out only later that he’d betrayed her.”
About the ex-Senate candidate and still-mayor, Giuliani, Rosie is unyielding. She has no patience with the argument that he has made city life broadly tolerable again: “That’s what a white conservative who’s rich would say, but not someone in a poor neighborhood.” But consider a more profound, more fundamental question: Rosie is a fervent defender of children and their rights. What about abortion? “I’m pro-choice,” she says — then adds, with utter conviction, “but I personally would never have an abortion.” This she relates to the gun issue, explaining that she recognizes the right to own a gun, but would never pick up one herself.
AN OLD PRO REFLECTS
In light of the ongoing controversies of Rosiedom, it’s of more than passing interest to hear from one of her beloved forerunners: Mike Douglas, the smooth-voiced host who ruled the afternoon air for years. Now, Rosie loves Mike, and Mike loves Rosie. She always wanted to do a show just like his. And she is responsible for a bit of a Douglas revival, putting him back into the public eye and spurring him to pen his memoirs — for which she wrote the introduction. Douglas leaves no doubt that he is Rosie’s number-one fan. He feels indebted to her. But he is skeptical, to put it mildly, about the course she has taken.
“I had plenty of political figures on the show,” he recalls, including Malcolm X (“He was scary”), Martin Luther King, and Buckley (repeatedly). But “I myself was apolitical on the show. I always had the feeling that, if I said something about this person or that, I’d be alienating half of my audience — or maybe more than half. I didn’t think that [voicing political opinions] was entertaining, and I still don’t.” When a guest made some political point or other, “I couldn’t even say, ‘I agree with you.’ I felt I had to remain neutral. That’s the difference. As a professional matter, I didn’t think it was right.”
Douglas is especially chagrined at Rosie’s treatment of Giuliani: “I don’t live in New York, but I get there every now and then, and I’m telling you, that man has done wonders for that city. There’s a visible change when you come to New York now. Before, it was an absolute pigpen. So I think her comments were out of place, myself. I love Rosie, but I think that was wrong.” As for Tom Selleck, “that poor guy: Rosie was really loaded for bear that day. I wouldn’t call it sandbagging, but it was close.” (Rosie says that Selleck had clearly understood that the two would discuss guns.) “If you have a platform,” continues Douglas, “you have to use it responsibly.” For instance, “if you have the one side on, you have to have the other side — absolutely. And if you have one candidate on, you should have them all on. Otherwise, it’s not fair. You’re showing a bias.” Informed that Rosie has had Hillary Clinton on her show about five times, Douglas quips, “You think she likes her?” (Rosie maintains that Hillary has appeared strictly in her capacity as First Lady.)
Despite all their boosterism, celebrities, Douglas believes, have little influence on the public: “I don’t think the people take their cues from entertainers. I really don’t, never have. That’s why I don’t understand why Rosie’s doing this.” He is particularly perplexed at the enthusiasm of so many celebrities for the current president: “They’re all on Bill Clinton’s side. After what this man did — I can’t understand that. I think he disgraced the office, and I don’t know if we’ll ever get that dignity back. At one time, you were so proud when the president and his wife went abroad. But not any longer. I know Bill Clinton is a very bright man and all, but—say, is it possible to be bright and stupid at the same time? Imagine a Rhodes scholar going and doing what he did! They ought to hang a sign on his door: ‘Discreet.’”
Douglas confides one more thing, of particular relevance to Rosie’s situation. At the height of his career, “we had a kidnap threat on my youngest daughter. You never read anything about it, because I wouldn’t let anything like that get out, but we were really uptight about it. I felt that her guard had to be armed. In fact, I was told by the mayor of Philadelphia [where the family was living] that I myself should carry a gun. I didn’t want to do that, and the mayor said, ‘Well, then your daughter should.’ So we had her driver carry a gun. I felt that it was necessary.”
THE QUEEN OF CANDID
Rosie O’Donnell is not your average show-biz bubblehead. Not only is she lavishly talented and generous, she is no worse a spokesman for left-liberal causes than full-timers like Al Hunt and Bill Press — or the typical Democratic congressman. She spits out the same talking points and statistics, drawn from such groups as Handgun Control, Inc., and the Children’s Defense Fund. She exhibits the same disdain for the reasoning, motives, and experience of political adversaries. And if she, who got her start on Ed McMahon’s Star Search, was “heinously” wrong about the effects of welfare reform, what about Professor-Senator Moynihan, who insisted that America would see “children on grates” and other “scenes of social trauma such as we haven’t known since the cholera epidemics”? Neither one of them has had any comeuppance.
Also, Rosie is just about devoid of spin: Ask her a question, and you’ll get a straight answer. She is dismayed by celebrities who, when pressed on something, “do the candidate’s shuffle,” as she says — “a little to the right, a little to the left.” She says matter-of-factly, but with a measure of disgust, that “most public figures don’t take risks.” There is, indeed, something refreshing about a TV personality so forthright and undisguised. Better an in-your-face Rosie than an equally biased Katie Couric or Bryant Gumbel, who insults you with a charade of objectivity.
Last, there is a certain humility about Rosie, appealing to even the most hidebound conservative. She doesn’t go in for such high-flown stuff as Barbra Streisand’s “The Artist as Citizen” (the title of the singer’s Kennedy School lecture). “I’m not a journalist,” says Rosie, and “anyone who takes my word as the word is wrong. I happen to have a TV show, and I choose to use it.” Her bottom line: “I do everything I can to use my celebrity for good. And whether you think that’s right or not, you have to know that.”
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NATIONAL REVIEW June 19, 2000 Issue
Rosie O’Donnell, Political Activist
A celebrity and her platform.
By Jay Nordlinger, NR's managing editor
They call her the “Queen of Nice,” but she didn’t ask for the title, and she refuses to wear the crown. “I am not the Queen of Nice,” she says emphatically, indeed, angrily. She likes her TV talk show to be sweet and light, but “I have serious and strong views” — about Woody Allen, for example, who married his wife’s daughter (or something like that), and O. J. Simpson, who . . . well, we all know what he did. And she is very, very tough on conservatives. In fact, Rosie O’Donnell has become the celebrity who most inflames the Right. She has surpassed Barbra Streisand, the Baldwin brothers, and even Jane Fonda, who has apparently found religion. Whether she’s plumping for the Clintons, socking it to Rudy Giuliani, or leading the cry for gun control, Rosie is making conservatives choke. She is using the bully pulpit of her stardom with a vengeance. And, in some ways, she is the perfect expression of modern liberalism.
Of her fame, there is no doubt: It is dizzying. Walk into any supermarket, glance at the magazine rack, and there’s Rosie. (Bill Buckley once noted the impossibility of “Mr. Carson”; it had to be “Johnny.” So it is with Rosie.) She’s a movie star, a television personality who rivals the almighty Oprah, a stand-up comic, a Broadway entertainer, an author, and an industry. She has a Barbie doll made in her likeness (yes), and that ultimate stamp of celebrity: a Christmas album. Time magazine listed her as one of the 25 most influential people in the country. About her activism, Rosie says, “I have a responsibility as well as an opportunity to speak to millions of people on a daily basis. It’s sad that celebrities’ opinions are given so much weight, but they are, in the culture we live in.”
Politically speaking, she considers herself primarily a child-welfare advocate. “I always knew,” she says, “that if I were ever in a position to have an effect on society, I would use it to benefit kids.” Rosie herself had a rough upbringing, of the Frank McCourt variety. And she has certainly put her money where her mouth is, devoting millions of dollars to children’s charities, mainly through a foundation of her own devising. Her political heroes? That’s easy: Hillary Clinton and Marian Wright Edelman, stalwarts of the Children’s Defense Fund. (“I’m a devout follower of hers,” says Rosie of Edelman.) Her fondest dreams are thoroughly Hillaryesque: national health care and national day care—in addition, of course, to gun control.
ON A SOAPBOX
Shortly after her show began in 1996, Rosie revealed herself as a Democrat. She was a bit nervous at first. As she explained to Entertainment Weekly, “I thought, ‘Uh-oh: I guess there’s a reason Dave [Letterman] and Jay [Leno] never get into their political affiliations. I’m going to get letters from Republicans about this.’ Then I realized: ‘What Republicans are watching daytime television? They’re too busy trying to make more money than anybody else.’” Rosie has a certain tic about Republicans and money. Recently, she opined that her neighbors in Greenwich, Conn., “have too much money.” Rosie’s liberalism — heavy with emotion — tends to be a cartoon liberalism: Every Republican is a sniffy man in a top hat and limo, instructing his driver to run down any urchin he can spot.
Since her unveiling as a Super Dem, Rosie has been relentless. She decried Republican welfare reform, signed into law by President Clinton, as “literally heinous” (she still thinks so). She raised money for the Clinton-Gore reelection, knocking Republican heads as she went. For Hillary, her affection is unbounded. She told her friend Nora Ephron, in an interview for Redbook, “I wish that she were running for Senate as a divorcée, but I will support her” in any case. The First Lady has been on the Rosie show at least five times. At last fall’s “Broadway for Hillary” fundraiser, Rosie spilled acid on Mayor Giuliani, then the likely Republican nominee versus Hillary. She said that he looked like a Pez dispenser. She said that if he wrote a book, it would be called “It Takes a Village Idiot” (her material is usually not so worn). Worse, in a joke about a mainly black Broadway cast, she implied that Giuliani was a racist. Hillary expressed her thanks by calling Rosie “absolutely incomparable.”
The talk-show host wasn’t through with the mayor. In December, as the Senate race was getting hot, she used her show to attack Giuliani for his policies on the homeless (which Giuliani supporters would characterize as “tough love”). “He’s out of control, this guy!” said Rosie. “Sure, just, you know — arrest all the homeless people.” Then she flashed the mayor’s phone and fax numbers on the screen, inviting her fans to register their outrage. She threatened to take to the streets herself, to be arrested. Giuliani, not surprisingly, had a response: “There’s no question that she’s a political operative.”
But the crucial moment for Rosie had come earlier in the year, in April: Columbine. The lesson of the tragedy, she decided, was the evil of guns. In a fit of fury, she said, “Outlaw all guns, and put all gun owners in jail!” Prior to this awful event, she now explains, “I wasn’t immersed in the gun issue. Child advocacy was my thing. I didn’t know who Wayne LaPierre was [he’s head of the National Rifle Association]. I felt spiritually called to the table.” What Rosie means is this: “There’s a part of the Mass — I don’t attend now, but I used to, as a kid — that goes, ‘This is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are they who are called to His supper.’ And I thought, ‘Those kids are like the sacrificial lamb,’ and it called me to the supper.” Rosie vowed to take up gun control as a crusade. She also likes to cite a line from Les Misérables, being a Broadway maven: “If I speak, I am condemned; if I stay silent, I am damned.”
Not long after Columbine, Tom Selleck was a guest on Rosie’s show, and the two of them had a testy — indeed, bitter — exchange over the NRA and guns. It was a strange moment for daytime television, and it is now part of gun-debate lore. Here is a taste of what Rosie said that day: “I think the Second Amendment is in the Constitution so that we can have muskets when the British people come over in 1800. I don’t think it’s in the Constitution to have assault weapons in the year 2000.” On the heels of the fracas, Rosie faced a problem: It was pointed out that Kmart, for whom she did commercials, was a major retailer of guns. Did that make her a hypocrite? She was reluctant to give up the gig, as all of her earnings from the spots went to charity, but she did so at the end of the year, realizing that her position was untenable.
Rosie’s latest political performance was as “emcee” of the “Million Mom March,” the rally for gun control held in Washington. In a sign of true political arrival, she was interviewed by Cokie Roberts on This Week. She was, as she usually is, fluent and impassioned as she trotted out every gun-control canard in the book: 4,000 “children” killed per year by guns, 20,000 gun laws riddled with “20,000 loopholes,” the NRA “stranglehold over Congress,” the rarity of gun deaths in other countries, and so on. At the rally itself, she charged, “The NRA is buying votes with blood money.” Charlton Heston, for his part, had little recourse but to laugh her off as “Tokyo Rosie.”
RUMBLES LEFT AND LEFTER
As Rosie herself implied with her comment about Letterman and Leno, it’s unusual for a talk-show host — at least one of this sort — to wax political. Her predecessors, who are also her models and idols — Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, Dinah Shore — never did so. Neither did Johnny. Jack Paar, who preceded Carson on The Tonight Show, could be a jerk about politics, and a lucky thing, too, for it led to one of Bill Buckley’s most dazzling and popular essays: “An Evening with Jack Paar” (found in the Buckley collection Rumbles Left and Right). Buckley appeared on the show in 1962, and he so unnerved his host that the poor man went on a several-day tear against Buckley, grouping him with the Nazis and Communists, in that charming liberal way we’ve come to know so well. For his troubles, Paar received a congratulatory phone call from President Kennedy.
In more recent times, Oprah Winfrey — bigger than Paar ever was — has largely avoided politics, although she did clash with cattlemen over the safety of American beef. And we must not forget Phil Donahue — a total political beast who, himself, is a definer of today’s liberalism.
Many TV insiders believe that Rosie runs a risk with her politicking: There are millions of Americans — customers — who are bound to take offense. Does she worry? “I never enter it into the equation,” she says. Neither is she troubled by questions of equal time and balance. “I can understand the concern,” but, in the case of Giuliani, for example, “I don’t know that anyone from his campaign would have wanted to be on the show” (fat chance). “We did have the other side with Tom Selleck, as badly as that turned out. I don’t think either of us was particularly proud of that, but I think he was brave to come on and discuss the issue with me — and that is the other side.” Following Selleckgate, “three or four people [who were to be guests on the show] canceled, and one other person, a country-western singer, called me,” seeking reassurance that all would be peaceful.
In the year since Columbine, Rosie’s stance on guns has softened, and she has learned the language of pragmatism. “As a mother, my emotional response was, ‘Let’s get rid of all guns.’ But that’s not going to happen.” Sure, “in a perfect world, I would love it if we didn’t have any handguns, but that’s not what I’m striving for, nor is it attainable. That’s an extremist view.” She now says, “I’m not against someone having a gun, as long as it’s licensed, registered, and has a child-safety lock.” Furthermore, “I don’t think gun owners are the enemy. I don’t think they’re evil.” Charlton Heston has pledged, bearing a rifle aloft, “From my cold, dead hands.” Says Rosie: “I don’t want to take his gun from his cold, dead hands, or his warm, live ones. That’s not what we’re asking for.”
She stresses that her push for gun control is part of her overall effort to aid children. So, does she believe that the NRA cares less about young ones than she does? She pauses for a second, then answers, “I would say, maybe they care about their own kids. But not kids in general. The only life that is important to them is white, Republican life.” The gun industry, she continues, “has a vested interest in not being regulated,” but “we don’t have a financial interest, because we’re mothers.” She attributes no decent motivation whatever to the NRA. Its position, she asserts, “is based on financial gain, not on patriotism or love of children.”
On the day of her talk with National Review — May 25 — Rosie was all over the news: One of her bodyguards had applied for a gun permit in Greenwich. For conservatives, this was Christmas morning. Here was one of the nation’s most visible gun haters, apparently seeing to it that she herself was protected by a gun while campaigning to leave everyone else defenseless. (Rosie and her family have been the targets of threats, stemming, she believes, from her antigun stance.) The hypocrisy seemed stinking, blatant. Yet Rosie pleads innocent: “The security people who work in my home do not have guns. The statistic is that you’re three times more likely to be a victim of violence if you own a gun. That’s why I choose not to have them in my home. But in public places, my security people, who are off-duty policemen, have guns” — which, she holds, is another matter.
In her politics, she remains a Clintonite to the core, but she does have misgivings about the president: “I have severe disappointments in his personal ethics. I lost a tremendous amount of respect for him during [the Lewinsky affair], and it has not been recovered. I haven’t forgotten, nor will I. But that’s a code of shame on him, not on Hillary.” Did she lose any respect at all for Hillary, what with her wild charges of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” and so on? No way. “I believe she believed her husband. I don’t believe for one minute that she sat on the Today show [where the First Lady alleged the “conspiracy”] knowing the truth of that situation. I believe her husband lied to her, as he did to everyone else, and that she found out only later that he’d betrayed her.”
About the ex-Senate candidate and still-mayor, Giuliani, Rosie is unyielding. She has no patience with the argument that he has made city life broadly tolerable again: “That’s what a white conservative who’s rich would say, but not someone in a poor neighborhood.” But consider a more profound, more fundamental question: Rosie is a fervent defender of children and their rights. What about abortion? “I’m pro-choice,” she says — then adds, with utter conviction, “but I personally would never have an abortion.” This she relates to the gun issue, explaining that she recognizes the right to own a gun, but would never pick up one herself.
AN OLD PRO REFLECTS
In light of the ongoing controversies of Rosiedom, it’s of more than passing interest to hear from one of her beloved forerunners: Mike Douglas, the smooth-voiced host who ruled the afternoon air for years. Now, Rosie loves Mike, and Mike loves Rosie. She always wanted to do a show just like his. And she is responsible for a bit of a Douglas revival, putting him back into the public eye and spurring him to pen his memoirs — for which she wrote the introduction. Douglas leaves no doubt that he is Rosie’s number-one fan. He feels indebted to her. But he is skeptical, to put it mildly, about the course she has taken.
“I had plenty of political figures on the show,” he recalls, including Malcolm X (“He was scary”), Martin Luther King, and Buckley (repeatedly). But “I myself was apolitical on the show. I always had the feeling that, if I said something about this person or that, I’d be alienating half of my audience — or maybe more than half. I didn’t think that [voicing political opinions] was entertaining, and I still don’t.” When a guest made some political point or other, “I couldn’t even say, ‘I agree with you.’ I felt I had to remain neutral. That’s the difference. As a professional matter, I didn’t think it was right.”
Douglas is especially chagrined at Rosie’s treatment of Giuliani: “I don’t live in New York, but I get there every now and then, and I’m telling you, that man has done wonders for that city. There’s a visible change when you come to New York now. Before, it was an absolute pigpen. So I think her comments were out of place, myself. I love Rosie, but I think that was wrong.” As for Tom Selleck, “that poor guy: Rosie was really loaded for bear that day. I wouldn’t call it sandbagging, but it was close.” (Rosie says that Selleck had clearly understood that the two would discuss guns.) “If you have a platform,” continues Douglas, “you have to use it responsibly.” For instance, “if you have the one side on, you have to have the other side — absolutely. And if you have one candidate on, you should have them all on. Otherwise, it’s not fair. You’re showing a bias.” Informed that Rosie has had Hillary Clinton on her show about five times, Douglas quips, “You think she likes her?” (Rosie maintains that Hillary has appeared strictly in her capacity as First Lady.)
Despite all their boosterism, celebrities, Douglas believes, have little influence on the public: “I don’t think the people take their cues from entertainers. I really don’t, never have. That’s why I don’t understand why Rosie’s doing this.” He is particularly perplexed at the enthusiasm of so many celebrities for the current president: “They’re all on Bill Clinton’s side. After what this man did — I can’t understand that. I think he disgraced the office, and I don’t know if we’ll ever get that dignity back. At one time, you were so proud when the president and his wife went abroad. But not any longer. I know Bill Clinton is a very bright man and all, but—say, is it possible to be bright and stupid at the same time? Imagine a Rhodes scholar going and doing what he did! They ought to hang a sign on his door: ‘Discreet.’”
Douglas confides one more thing, of particular relevance to Rosie’s situation. At the height of his career, “we had a kidnap threat on my youngest daughter. You never read anything about it, because I wouldn’t let anything like that get out, but we were really uptight about it. I felt that her guard had to be armed. In fact, I was told by the mayor of Philadelphia [where the family was living] that I myself should carry a gun. I didn’t want to do that, and the mayor said, ‘Well, then your daughter should.’ So we had her driver carry a gun. I felt that it was necessary.”
THE QUEEN OF CANDID
Rosie O’Donnell is not your average show-biz bubblehead. Not only is she lavishly talented and generous, she is no worse a spokesman for left-liberal causes than full-timers like Al Hunt and Bill Press — or the typical Democratic congressman. She spits out the same talking points and statistics, drawn from such groups as Handgun Control, Inc., and the Children’s Defense Fund. She exhibits the same disdain for the reasoning, motives, and experience of political adversaries. And if she, who got her start on Ed McMahon’s Star Search, was “heinously” wrong about the effects of welfare reform, what about Professor-Senator Moynihan, who insisted that America would see “children on grates” and other “scenes of social trauma such as we haven’t known since the cholera epidemics”? Neither one of them has had any comeuppance.
Also, Rosie is just about devoid of spin: Ask her a question, and you’ll get a straight answer. She is dismayed by celebrities who, when pressed on something, “do the candidate’s shuffle,” as she says — “a little to the right, a little to the left.” She says matter-of-factly, but with a measure of disgust, that “most public figures don’t take risks.” There is, indeed, something refreshing about a TV personality so forthright and undisguised. Better an in-your-face Rosie than an equally biased Katie Couric or Bryant Gumbel, who insults you with a charade of objectivity.
Last, there is a certain humility about Rosie, appealing to even the most hidebound conservative. She doesn’t go in for such high-flown stuff as Barbra Streisand’s “The Artist as Citizen” (the title of the singer’s Kennedy School lecture). “I’m not a journalist,” says Rosie, and “anyone who takes my word as the word is wrong. I happen to have a TV show, and I choose to use it.” Her bottom line: “I do everything I can to use my celebrity for good. And whether you think that’s right or not, you have to know that.”
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