Oh, Arianna!

ONE might expect that Arianna Huffington would be happy. As a columnist and media personality, she has spent five years telling politicians, especially Republicans, to make compassion their guiding ethic. Now the Republican presidential nominee is someone who believes as she does about the importance of government assistance to the volunteer groups, often religious, that tend to the poor. More recently, Huffington has been an enthusiast for campaign-finance reform; and that issue has dominated the presidential race as much as any issue has.

Yet Huffington is far from happy. Her new book, How to Overthrow the Government, is a catalogue of complaints, a prolonged howl of indignation. It is also a chronicle of how that indignation led her from being a conservative hanger-on to Newt Gingrich to being a publicist for Warren Beatty’s political career. It , is, more prosaically, a bunch of her columns stitched together, which often makes the book sound like a rambling monologue by Ross Perot’s crazy aunt.

About the Author

Ramesh Ponnuru

Ramesh Ponnuru is the editor of National Review, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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ONE might expect that Arianna Huffington would be happy. As a columnist and media personality, she has spent five years telling politicians, especially Republicans, to make compassion their guiding ethic. Now the Republican presidential nominee is someone who believes as she does about the importance of government assistance to the volunteer groups, often religious, that tend to the poor. More recently, Huffington has been an enthusiast for campaign-finance reform; and that issue has dominated the presidential race as much as any issue has.

Yet Huffington is far from happy. Her new book, How to Overthrow the Government, is a catalogue of complaints, a prolonged howl of indignation. It is also a chronicle of how that indignation led her from being a conservative hanger-on to Newt Gingrich to being a publicist for Warren Beatty’s political career. It , is, more prosaically, a bunch of her columns stitched together, which often makes the book sound like a rambling monologue by Ross Perot’s crazy aunt.