Arianna Huffington is an American political commentator and author of a weekly syndicated column as well as numerous books. She was once staunchly right-wing and a favorite of the Republican party, and even of Newt Gingrich during his political heydey. During the late 1990s she underwent a political shift away from the right wing and away from the political establishment as well; while she can certainly be described today as 'left-wing', she's not an advocate for the Democratic party and describes herself as a "progressive populist." During her brief 2003 campaign for California governor, she ran as an independent. She's known today for her outspoken criticism of the Iraq War, both in her columns and her popular blog, The Huffington Post.
Life and times
She was born in Greece in 1950 as Ariadne Stassinopoulos, and grew up with intensely politically-minded parents. Her mother's family had fled Russia during the Revolution and her father had served in the Greek resistance to German occupation, spending much of the war in a concentration camp. Arianna moved to England at age sixteen, and she attended the University of Cambridge where she earned a master's in economics. At twenty-one she became president of Cambridge's debate society, the Cambridge Union. She then moved to London and shacked up with literary critic Bernard Levin, where she wrote columns and occasionally appeared on TV shows. Bernard refused to marry her, and she eventually left him, which led to her moving to the U.S. in 1980.
She met Michael Huffington at a party in 1985, and married him the next year. He was a businessman, working for the family oil company. Michael and Arianna moved together to Washington where he worked for the Department of Defense before leaving in 1992 to serve a term in the House of Representatives. He then lost an expensive, bitterly-contested contest for a Senate seat in 1994 to Dianne Feinstein. The two divorced in 1997, and in 1998 he publicly admitted to being bisexual.* Chivalry is not only dead but its head has been stuck on a pike as a warning to others - Michael endorsed Arnold Schwarzenegger over Arianna in the 2003 California gubernatorial race.
Incidentally, isn't it both enlightening and interesting to analyze politics as the soap opera it really is?
Conversion
I wrote above that Arianna converted to left-wing politics during the late 1990s; it would be more accurate to say that her public stance shifted during this time than to suggest that she experienced some sort of revelation that changed her thinking. Her attitude shift was gradual; "certainly . . . no overnight flip-flop", as she explains in an essay about it. "The seeds . . . were sown a long time ago."
You might say that Arianna Huffington the Republican was the a 'Compassionate Conservative' of the sort that George W. Bush clearly never was. She has a history of calling for attention to the poorest, believing from the ideas of John Maynard Keynes that she encountered during her economic studies that the free market does not inherently protect the poorest. Neither did she believe in Great Society-style programs; she thought that they were ineffective but that their goals were essentially laudable. Indeed, she first came to the attention of Newt Gingrich during a speech in Washington after the 1992 election, in which she reminded her conservative audience of the Biblical instruction to help the poorest in society.
She was, in her words, "seduced, fooled, blinded, bamboozled," by Gingrich's message of the moral imperative to help the poor, but gradually she realized that this message was mere rhetoric; during her husband's political campaigns (for the GOP, of course) she saw homeless shelters and homes for battered women and decided that politics as it's practiced in the U.S. is "antithetical to real reform and tailor-made to perpetuate a broken status quo."
Her columns - archived on her website - provide a glimpse of her transition as she began to recognize that her own moral values were out of step with the real aims of the Republican party. She began to believe that government expenditures are necessary to combat poverty. Her belief is that mainstream politics as a whole is uninterested in ending poverty and despite her progressive sentiments she has shown reluctance to engage with the Democratic party, although after she dropped out of the California gubernatorial race, she asked her supporters to vote against the recall; she endorsed John Kerry in the 2004 U.S. Presidential race. She has cast herself in recent years more as an opponent of the right than an ally of the left.
Her works
Books
Maria Callas and Picasso are biographies; the rest concern politics and society. How to Overthrow the Government details her disgust with modern politics, and calls for reform.
The Huffington Post
Arianna is the editor of The Huffington Post, a mostly left-leaning blog established May 9, 2005; her own writings are joined by those of a number of other contributors, including Harry Shearer, voice of a hell of a lot of characters on The Simpsons and host of NPR's Le Show; and John Conyers, U.S. Representative from my own home state of Michigan and all around kick-ass dude. It's one of the more interesting weblogs out there, if only for the all-star cast of contributors it boasts.
Other stuff
She's one of the co-hosts of Left, Right and Center, a nationally-syndicated public radio show, and she writes regularly for The Progressive Populist.
Sources, and places to find her
*David Brock, gay former Republican and author of Blinded by the Right claims that Arianna knew of her husband's sexual orientation when they married; if this sort of salacious gay Washington gossip amuses you, you'll love his book, in which he tells of sexploits - both his own and those of others - in suitably lacivious detail.