Huffington, known as Perot-by-the-Sea, is a maverick Republican who is also very rich. He got rich in his Texas family’s oil-and-gas business-and his wealth, about $70 million, has allowed him to ignore the usual rules of politics. Huffington made his first and only bid for elective office in 1992 by spending 85.4 million to unseat a nine-term Republican incumbent, Rep. Robert Lagomarsino, in California’s 22d Congressional District. The total set a national spending record for House campaigns-but what stunned party regulars was the fact that $5.2 million was Huffington’s own money Then, after serving only eight months in the House, Huffington announced his intention to run for the Senate seat now held by Democrat Dianne Feinstein, 60. “I’ve worked with a lot of candidates over the years, and he’s about as different as they come,” says Larry McCarthy, Huffington’s media consultant. “He doesn’t think the way a normal candidate would think.”
Then there’s Mrs. Huffington. Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, 43, is both beautiful and brilliant-a politically connected socialite with a formidable resume. Arianna went to Cambridge, where she was president of the Cambridge Union, the British university’s prestigious debating society. She published her first book at the age of 23 and wrote controversial biographies of Picasso and Maria Callas. She has her own talk show on a conservative cable network and she will soon publish a manifesto calling for nothing less than the spiritual transformation of American life. This book is entitled “The Fourth Instinct,” which Arianna says is altruism. (The first three are survival, power and sex.) “What I’m talking about is a world that is waiting to unfold.” she says. “The idea of a thousand points of light is purely cosmetic-I’m talking about 200 million.”
Arianna Huffington, in short, is very High Concept. Her husband acknowledges the similarity to Hillary Clinton’s public search for a “politics of meaning,” which also is rooted in a trendy spirituality. “There is something in our modern culture that fears spirituality, and I suspect it is this,” Arianna writes in her new book. “Spirituality, like grace, is beyond our control.” She herself sees the-possibility of “telepathic communications” and “time and light breakthroughs.” And though she likes to downplay what she refers to as “the phantasmagoric aspects of the spiritual journey,” she reveals in chapter 10 that she had an “out-of-body experience” after the birth of her first daughter. Arianna insists her ideas are “nothing odd” and ,‘very mainstream." They are political as well. “The greatest tragedy of the modern welfare state,” she writes, “is that we have allowed it to deprive us of a fundamental opportunity to practice virtue, responsibility, generosity and compassion.” But not to worry. Altruism will be restored, Arianna proclaims, when a “critical mass” of Americans cause spirituality “to spread like an epidemic.”
Huffington is somewhat more circumspect-but his goal, he says, is the gradual abolition of the welfare state. He’d start small, by changing the tax code to encourage charitable giving and by capping welfare payments for low-income women at two children. Meanwhile, as a first-term member of the House, he has broken with his party by favoring abortion on demand, the Brady bill and a ban on assault weapons. Huffington even supports allowing gays to serve in the military and continued funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. But he’s also identifying himself with widely popular causes. He recently spent $100,000 of his own money to help put a “three strikes and you’re out” initiative on the California ballot in November.
Huffington is now the consensus favorite to win the Republican nomination. His main competitor in the primary is former representative William Dannemever, 64, a conservative war horse from Orange County. Dannemeyer is already hammering away at Huffington’s “social liberalism” and his wealth. (At the Republican state convention two weeks ago, conservative activists showered the hall with ersatz $1 million bills with Huffington’s face on them.) But the millionaire is already looking past the primary to November. Political experts predict he’ll have to spend at least $15 million to run against Feinstein, a formidable candidate and fund raiser. Huffington says he hopes to spend no more than $5 million of his own money, though he won’t rule out spending more. A victory, he says, will “send shock waves across this nation.” Given the high-octane beliefs of California’s newest power couple, that much is all but guaranteed.
