Huffington's evolution from bombastic reactionary to pious progressive has not occurred linearly. In the years after the release of The Female Woman, she continued to write frequently and controversially. There was a gossipy biography of Maria Callas and a shabby and utterly philistine "life" of Picasso. In 1986, she married the wealthy up-and-coming Republican politician Michael Huffington, who was elected to the House of Representatives from California in 1992 and then defeated in a Senate run two years later. Huffington's notable effort in this period was a spiritual guide called The Fourth Instinct: The Call of the Soul. As she explained, "the charge of our Fourth Instinct is to move us from the tyranny of our fight-or-flight mechanism to the liberation of a practical spirituality that transforms our everyday life." Some of the themes in The Fourth Instinct built on notions that she had advanced in After Reason, which claimed that the "spirit of man" had been firmly rejected by modern society. This book, like so many of her books, is, well, dumb. A hunger for the holy is never conducive to clear thinking. The Fourth Instinct reads like a mix of Deepak Chopra and Milton Friedman. "Many modern intellectuals," Huffington writes, like a good Reaganite, "are incapable of conceiving of social renewal that is the result of human action, but not of government design."
Huffington began writing a right-wing syndicated column. She fervently supported the Contract with America and the rise of Newt Gingrich, while at the same time preaching compassion for the poor. She became a figure in mid-'90s Washington, using her new megaphone, and her dining table, to speak out more loudly on the same issues that had occupied her for years. Reading Huffington's columns from this period is disagreeable, because her mixture of spiritualism, libertarianism, New Right dogmatism, and concern for the downtrodden does not amount to anything coherent. In 1995, she wrote a piece for The Weekly Standard declaring that Gingrich should challenge Bill Clinton for the presidency because the Speaker was the only national figure who truly cared about poverty and inner-city turmoil. "Precisely because Gingrich is right about the moral crisis the country is facing--millions of lives and entire communities destroyed by drugs, alcohol, gangs, and violence--there is a moral imperative for him to fill the leadership vacuum and address the growing devastation." Another column made the claim that the White House feared Gingrich because he could "paint vivid pictures both of the crisis and of what life will look like after the revolution," while other Republicans could not.
It is hard to know how seriously to consider Huffington's work in those years. She was a vocal critic of Great Society efforts to address social problems, but her anti-government instincts prevented her from articulating any sort of tangible blueprint that addressed real-world conditions. She may have been sincere in her concerns about poverty, but how could anybody in their right (or left) mind have believed that Newt Gingrich was the white knight sent to cure urban destitution? One is struck, again, by the discrepancy between the mediocrity of her work and the skill with which she consolidated her fame.
As the right's revolution began to cool, Huffington's revolutionary fervor started to wane, too. The Huffingtons divorced in 1997, and the following year Michael Huffington announced that he was bisexual. In 1998, Huffington published a book called Greetings from the Lincoln Bedroom, a lame anti-Clinton satire--Huffington is painfully unfunny--that nicely coincided with a general disgust with Washington. Her columns also became increasingly, and shrewdly, non-partisan. By the time Gingrich resigned as party leader in 1998, it was clear that Huffington was ready for her next move. After the GOP lost seats in the midterm elections in 1998, Huffington concluded that Gingrich and company had failed because they had abandoned their agenda of, in Gingrich's words, "coming to terms with what's happening to the poorest Americans," an electoral analysis that at least had the advantage of being original.
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http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=ce686bd3-233a-44a2-bdd4-ee3d879a1967&p=1
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