Joining the Boys' Club

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 30, 2007 6:14 AM

"Am I nuts?"

Campbell Brown raises the question herself, nursing a Diet Coke -- she's only allowed one a day because of her pregnancy -- at the Mayflower bar.

She has just quit NBC, where she tasted the fruits of fame as a weekend morning host and "Nightly News" backup, to launch a prime-time talk show for CNN. "I know how risky it is. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't scary. But it's also exhilarating, and I miss that feeling."

Brown, 39, also knows that she's the latest young and attractive network host to try to make it in the cable wars. "Appearance plays a role, there's no getting around it," says the 5-foot-8 journalist, adding that she's worried about her impending weight gain. "It's television," Brown says, and there is "no doubt" she will have a harder time in 15 years. "We live contract to contract."

Brown is replacing Paula Zahn, 51, the former CBS anchor who was herself deemed a hot young thing when she made the leap -- first to Fox News and then to CNN, which initially touted her as "a little bit sexy" in promos that were promptly yanked.

"The test will be 10 years from now, when we see how many of us are still on the air," Zahn says.

Brown's move raises two intriguing questions: Why are only two other women (Greta Van Susteren of Fox and Nancy Grace of Headline News) on the air as prime-time cable news hosts? And is it possible to succeed with an 8 p.m. show built on news and interviews -- as Zahn tried to do -- when up against the ultra-opinionated likes of Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann?

Zahn was pushed to try several different formats, from politics to magazine-style reports. She concedes the constant changes hurt her ratings, but she also won plaudits for tackling such difficult subjects as race in America. Still, despite some gains with younger viewers, she sometimes slipped into third or even fourth place (behind Grace).

"Looking at the success of the opinion-driven shows, we tried to counterpunch as best we could, and we never sacrificed our objectivity or our quality," Zahn says.

Brown now inherits a similar challenge. "It's an incredibly difficult time slot," she says. "I can't obsess over that or I'll make myself crazy. . . . I'm not Bill O'Reilly. I'm not Keith Olbermann. I'm not going to do opinion. That's not who I am."

The arena remains dominated by white men. Other women fronting prime-time cable shows, such as Deborah Norville and Rita Cosby, have come and gone. Barred by her NBC contract from starting until Nov. 1, Brown will be eight months pregnant when she begins the show.

"I'm going to be waddling onto the set," she says. "If people have a problem with women in these jobs, I'll be getting a rude awakening."

Brown, who is pulling for her former NBC colleague Katie Couric to succeed as CBS anchor, is disheartened by Couric's struggle: "The emphasis on Katie's appearance -- I hate it, it's so frustrating. You don't hear the same kind of comments about male anchors. You just don't."

The daughter of a former Louisiana secretary of state who spent six months in jail for lying to an FBI investigator -- he was caught up in a broader scandal involving former governor Edwin Edwards -- Brown has a Cajun's spicy approach to life. Friends say she plays as hard as she works.

"You wouldn't want to drive with her in a car," says one friend, Slate correspondent John Dickerson. "She goes after driving in the same way she does a story."

At 16, Brown was kicked out of the Madeira School in McLean for sneaking off campus to go to a party (which hasn't stopped school officials from constantly inviting her as a speaker). She was a self-described Colorado ski bum while in college, taught English in Czechoslovakia (where she acquired a banana tattoo on her ankle), and worked as an intern at Washington's NewsChannel8 and Montgomery Cable.

After that, the best that Brown could do was a $6-an-hour reporting job at the NBC station in Topeka, Kan. She moved up to the NBC station in Richmond, but "I could not for the life of me get a job in D.C.," Brown says. She finally made it to Baltimore's WBAL and did some freelancing for Washington's WRC before landing a job with NBC's affiliate service, churning out reports for local stations.

Brown's break came in 1998 when she was detailed to MSNBC, covering politics for Brian Williams's cable newscast. As for the broadcast side, she was a young woman in a hurry. "I could not get on 'Nightly News' to save my life," she grouses.

After covering George W. Bush's 2000 campaign for the cable channel, Brown got her shot at the big time when NBC made her a White House correspondent. Tom Brokaw and Williams, who was in line for Brokaw's anchor job, served as her mentors, and Brown's career quickly took off.

While living in Adams Morgan, she began hosting off-the-record gatherings with such administration hotshots as Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz and Lynne Cheney. Only female correspondents were invited.

In 2003 Brown packed her bags for New York. She had been tapped as co-host of "Weekend Today" and eventually became Williams's primary substitute on NBC's nightly newscast.

Brown acknowledges she had problems adjusting to the fluffier side of morning television. She was accustomed to grilling then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, she says, and "you don't have to do that to the woman coming in to make pasta."

During a reporting trip to Iraq in 2004, Brown found herself at odds with Dan Senor, the spokesman for the U.S. civilian authority. "I wanted access and he didn't want me to have access," she recalls. "We just butted heads a lot."

Back home, she watched Senor's televised news conferences and told friends he was cute. Brown invited him to dinner to discuss foreign policy, and Brokaw somehow got included. That prompted a distress call to Brown's best friend, Washington reporter Anne Kornblut.

"She asked me to come to New York," says Kornblut, now with The Washington Post. "She said, 'I need someone to distract Brokaw so I can flirt with Dan.' "

It must have worked; the two tied the knot a year later, in what was Brown's second marriage. Senor now works at an investment fund and is a Fox News commentator. "These are two very ambitious, high-profile people," Dickerson says.

Last year, Brown was a contender for Couric's job at "Today" but was passed over for Meredith Vieira in what friends describe as a major disappointment.

"It's been written to death: 'Oh my God, she's leaving because she didn't get Katie's job.' Of course I wanted that job," Brown says. "Who wouldn't want that job? It's one of the best jobs in television."

Brown concluded that as a part-time anchor and correspondent -- she covered Hurricane Katrina and the death of Pope John Paul II -- there was no way for her to grow at NBC. "You've got 22 minutes at 'Nightly News,' which is Brian's show. You've got the 'Today' show, which is doing a limited amount of news."

Something else bothered her as well: a sense that the next generation is abandoning network news. "My younger sister, honest to God, has never seen 'Nightly News.' When anything happens in the world, she has on CNN. In cable you can go a little more in depth, be a little more inside baseball. In broadcast, you have to simplify things, and on occasion you're forced to dumb things down."

The tradeoff, of course, is that cable audiences are relatively modest -- 1 million is considered a strong showing -- compared with the 7 million to 8 million viewers who watch the Williams newscast. For the first time in her career, Brown will have to carry a show built around her personality, in an environment where outrage gets the highest ratings. That ultimately was too great a burden for Zahn, who also steered clear of opinion, and Brown freely admits: "It may not work."

Leaving NBC was hard -- Brown says she cried many times before telling her bosses she was leaving -- and the question was whether she wanted to remain in a comfortable environment, surrounded by friends.

Or, she says, "did I want to hold my breath and jump over the cliff?"

All right, let's look at some politics this morning. I wrote a column last Thursday saying that the country was growing more accepting of the idea of a female president--namely Hillary--as the long campaign dragged on. Turns out I was ahead of my time--by a day.

"Not that long ago," writes Time's Jay Carney, "it was a widely held opinion among conservatives in the professional political class that Hillary Clinton would be a dream Democratic presidential nominee -- for the Republicans. Her high negatives, divisive personality, weak political skills, excess baggage and reputation as a big government lefty would all combine to make her the perfect opponent for a Republican nominee trying to change the subject to anything but what the voting public had come to hate about the previous 7-8 years of Republican rule. It didn't matter how unpopular Bush was or the GOP had become, this thinking went, because Hillary simply couldn't win a general election.

"That thinking was always a little foolish and wishful, because it ignored the fact that all Hillary (or any other Dem for that matter) would have to do is win the states Kerry won in 2004, plus one big one or several smaller ones. (Ohio alone, where the GOP was decimated in 2006, would do it. Other states that in the current environment could be Dem pick-ups are New Mexico, Iowa, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, West Virginia, even Virginia).

"But you don't hear those assumptions about Senator Clinton's fatal weaknesses from Republican pros much anymore. In fact, you hear the opposite. Republicans now sound worried that Hillary will win the nomination. Why? Because she's shown herself to be so formidable in the Democratic primary campaign thus far. The biggest eye-opener to R's has been her success in parrying Obama's challenge while enhancing her credentials as the most experienced and sober-minded Democrat in the field on issues of national security."

Some conservatives are starting to give the former first lady her due, starting with National Review Editor Rich Lowry:

"Hillary Clinton has led in almost every national poll among the Democratic presidential candidates, usually by double digits. She has turned in a solid, self-assured performance in all the debates, has revved up an impressive organization and hasn't made a major mistake under the glare of a media that magnify everything she does.

"Clinton is the underestimated frontrunner. How much will-he-or-won't-he commentary has been devoted to almost-certainly-won't Al Gore, and how many glossy pages and adoring column inches to Barack Obama, as she continues her steady march toward the nomination? Conservative commentators like me have especially tended to discount her. We have argued that she'd never dare to run for Senate in New York; that if she ran, she'd be a terrible candidate; and that if she really ran for president, she would collapse under the weight of her own dullness and high negatives. Alas and alack, it is instead incontrovertible that -- in her own way -- she's a talented politician who has a clear path to the Democratic presidential nomination and to the presidency.

"She's not a natural, a fact highlighted all the more by her association by marriage to the great natural politician of his generation. If the test of a candidate is whether you would like to sit down and have a beer with her, she will never pass it. She excels on other tests."

NYT columnist David Brooks also gives Hillary a hat tip:

"The biggest story of this presidential campaign is the success of Hillary Clinton. Six months ago many people thought she was too brittle and calculating and that voters would never really bond with her. But now she seems to offer the perfect combination of experience and change.

"She's demonstrating that it really helps to have lived in the White House. She can draw on a range of experiences unmatched by her rivals. She's dominated most of the debates. She's transformed her position on Iraq without a ripple. Her measured, statistic-filled speeches rarely inspire passion, but always confidence.

"Her success has put incredible pressure on Barack Obama. He continues to attract huge crowds and huge money, but he also continues to make rookie mistakes, like saying he'd talk with Hugo Chávez . . .

"The one thing Republicans had going for them was the head-to-heads. Bush, the war and the party could all be unpopular, but individual G.O.P. candidates beat Clinton because her negatives were so high. But she is changing that. People who've said they would never vote for her will take a second look once they see her campaign.

"That means in 2008, Hillary won't save the G.O.P. An orthodox Republican will not beat an orthodox Democrat."

Of course it would be unfair to judge any public person by letters she wrote as a college student. But the New York Times scores a bundle of Hillary's 1960s correspondence, and it makes her more interesting than the carefully controlled persona we see today:

"Since Xmas vacation, I've gone through three and a half metamorphoses and am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me. So far, I've used alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, educational and social reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity."

"Sunday was lethargic from the beginning as I wallowed in a morass of general and specific dislike and pity for most people but me especially."

"Can you be a misanthrope and still love or enjoy some individuals? How about a compassionate misanthrope?"

Writing actual letters! Today it's all electronic: lol u must be 2 funny. brb. Not much about being a misanthrope.

The L.A. Times makes a trenchant observation about the 2008 race:

"It's easy to tell the difference between the two parties on foreign policy in this presidential campaign. The Democrats all want to talk about getting out of Iraq, but not so much about Al Qaeda or terrorism. The Republicans all want to talk about terrorism, but not so much about Iraq.

"Although fireworks erupted last week among the leading Democratic candidates, those differences are narrow compared with the chasm between the two parties' worldviews, one focused on battling the threat of radical Islam, the other on ending the war.

"The problem each party faces, polls show, is that most Americans want answers to both questions, not just one or the other."

Finally, I know most of you are too high-minded to click on the 50 Most Beautiful People on the Hill, but for those who can't resist . . .