Have No Fear!

What can you say about a woman who went up against The Terminator and lived to tell the tale? In 2003, Arianna Huffington ran for governor of California and although badly beaten by Arnold Schwarzenegger, she was far from terminated. In fact, during her 35-year career as a writer and political pundit, Huffington has shown a knack for bouncing back – and grabbing headlines in the process. Although best known as a nationally syndicated columnist and host of the public radio show, Left, Right, and Center, she donned pajamas and literally climbed into bed with humorist Al Franken for a television special called Strange Bedfellows, which aired on Comedy Central during the 1996 election. Mixing humor with politics is old hat for Huffington, who has won an Emmy as part of the writing team of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. And if laughing at politics is dangerous for a supposedly serious political commentator, that’s nothing compared to the even bigger taboo Huffington challenged when, shortly after Strange Bedfellows aired, she stunned Republicans and Democrats alike by switching her political affiliation.

Her latest major project has been the 2005 launch of her Webpage, The Huffington Post, with a focus so broad (or scattered, if you listen to her critics, who are legion) that it was predicted to flop. Nikki Finke, writing in the LA Weekly under the headline “Why Arianna’s Blog Blows,” deemed it “the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable” and went on to add, “She has now made an online ass of herself.” But in less than two years The Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com) has become so successful that former adversary (and now friend) Al Franken calls it a “widely read, hugely influential liberal blog” and even Nikki Finke has decided that the Post is “an asset to the Internet dialogue.” Huffington was named to the 2006 Time magazine’s list of the world’s most influential people.

 The flamboyant, attractive Huffington, age 56, lives in Los Angeles with her two daughters, where she is passionately involved in community causes. She is a frequent guest on shows from Oprah to Nightline to Larry King Live and has recently published her 11th book, On Becoming Fearless…in Love, Work, and Life (Little, Brown and Co., 2006).

If the word “fearless” in the title jumps out and grabs you, perhaps it’s because clinical anxiety disorders affect more than 20 million Americans. Some fears are rational – there’s good reason to avoid fire, for example – but a surprising number of these clinical disorders revolve around social fear. It makes sense to be fearful if you’re adrift in a boat during a storm, but why do we sometimes feel the same level of terror, or worse, over the mere idea of public speaking?

Physical fears are the result of what centuries of evolution have hard-wired into our brains, but social fears are largely based on what we tell ourselves, and it’s primarily these social fears that Huffington addresses in her book. The key word in the title isn’t “fearless,” it’s “becoming.” At first glance, or at least when one considers the simple biography above, Huffington seems to be one of those rare creatures who was born with total self-confidence, who has moved effortlessly from one success to the next. In reality, she has struggled with fear and self-doubt all her life.

Arianna Stassinopoulos moved from her native Greece to England when she was 16 in order to attend Cambridge University. At 21, she became president of the famed debating society, The Cambridge Union, and she ultimately graduated with an MA in Economics.

This may sound like the resume of a young woman prepared to conquer the world, but a theme that resonates both in Huffington’s books and her personal life is the particular challenges of being a talented woman associated with a powerful man. Two of her most successful early books were Picasso: Creator and Destroyer (Simon & Schuster, 1988), written about a man almost as renowned for his bad treatment of women as for his paintings and Maria Callas: The Woman behind the Legend (Cooper Square Press, 2002) about the opera singer who abandoned her career, and in many aspects her entire identity, in order to pursue a doomed affair with tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

This could have been Huffington’s story as well. With her Cambridge degree, a thriving career as a commentator, and several books under her belt, the then 35-year-old Arianna Stassinopoulos met millionaire Michael Huffington at a party in San Francisco in 1985. They married the next year and moved to Washington, DC, where Michael was appointed to the Department of Defense. He later made a successful run for the House of Representatives. The couple had two children.

But all was not quite as it seemed. In 1994, Michael Huffington lost a close race for a Senate seat in California to Dianne Feinstein, and the next year he disclosed his bisexuality. The subsequent end of the marriage was crushing for Arianna, but in a situation where some women might opt to keep a low profile, she opted to get into bed with a comedian on national TV. Following her Comedy Central appearance with Al Franken and subsequent work on Politically Incorrect, Huffington emerged as the sexy, funny, iconoclastic female voice of the right.

It was a role that brought her tremendous national exposure, but once again, nothing was as simple as it seemed. Huffington’s relationship with the Republican Party was unraveling in much the same way as her marriage had. A lifelong crusader for the less fortunate, Huffington gradually became dismayed with her party’s position on social issues. In 2003 she ran as an Independent in the recall election for governor of California, hoping to garner enough of the vote to stop the recall and thus thwart Schwarzenegger. In the end, she captured only 0.6 percent of the vote and, in fact, even her ex-husband endorsed Schwarzenegger.

It’s one thing to lose an election, or even to lose a husband. This sort of thing happens to people in public life on a regular basis. A bigger problem was the backlash that came with her political crossover, a move that alienated a lot of friends. In On Becoming Fearless, she graphically and painfully describes how Republicans didn’t want to talk to her at dinner parties and some Democrats questioned her loyalty. (For the record, her blog criticizes both parties almost equally.) By publicly changing her mind, Huffington did the most politically incorrect thing of all – she implied she might have been wrong about something. And by her willingness to challenge players on her own team in famously partisan Washington, she has risked making herself a target for both the right and the left.

No wonder she says that the fear of rocking the boat is the one that most paralyzes us when making decisions.

“The most common response to fear is conformity,” Huffington says, pointing out that just as some animals adopt protective coloring to help them hide from predators, the first instinct of a frightened person is to try and blend in. Her favorite example is Hillary Clinton, who Huffington famously and amusingly told Time magazine “is clearly frightened of losing. You can smell the fear on her. It wafts around her like cheap perfume: Eau Don’t Let Me Screw Up and Flush My Chances Down the Toilette.” Huffington believes Clinton suffers from “the soul-sapping tyranny of trying to please and placate everybody” and goes on to tell Time, “Her fear has caused a complete disconnect from who she really is and what she really thinks – that is, if she even knows anymore.”

Love her, hate her, diss her, quote her – no matter what your opinion, it’s impossible to deny that Arianna Huffington speaks her mind. And her fearlessness, while undoubtedly causing her a few bumps along the way, has led to her equally undeniable media power. In an exclusive interview with Selling Power, Huffington discusses the specific challenges women face and how anyone can keep fear from overtaking their lives. •