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"FacebookPinterest\n\nTo really understand Joe Scarborough, to understand why he's the conservative liberals suddenly think is swell, to understand why Morning Joe has become the best and most buzzed-about political show on television\u2014and yes, this is the same Joe Scarborough whose Republican bona fides included joining the Clinton-crucifixion team while in Congress\u2014you need to hear his Paul McCartney story.\n\nIt starts with a man crush.\n\n\"I mean, I love Lennon, but I worship McCartney. He's my idol.\" He continues: \"Seriously, Paul McCartney's had a great impact on my life. On my personality and my trajectory.\" Congress and MSNBC? \"Everything. My sensibilities.\" He even loved him when he married Heather and dyed his hair. \"Paul can do no wrong. He is my hero. My love hero.\" Seriously, he said love hero. He's loved him since he was a sheltered teenager in Elmira, New York, and Pensacola, Florida, the son of devout Baptist parents who ran beauty pageants. \"I had only one poster growing up: Paul McCartney.\" At 14, he started a band with his friends called\u2026the Establishment. In the '70s! \"Didn't drink, didn't smoke. I went to church a lot. It wasn't like I was a dork. I was a popular guy. I played football. I just didn't do that.\"\n\nJoe warns me that there will be pain in the Paul McCartney story.\n\nHis wife, Susan, a soft-spoken strawberry blonde who used to work for Jeb Bush, rolls her pretty eyes. She is wearing the expression of a wife who has heard the Paul McCartney story about 200 times. Tonight her husband is telling it at a corner table at P. J. Clarke's, Joe's favorite restaurant in his Manhattan neighborhood, the Upper West Side (yes, he lives with all the liberals). It's the same table where he wrote most of his last book, The Last Best Hope, a smart but not very hopeful (if you're a Republican) screed about how the GOP fucked up big-time and is failing him and the world. He's trying to make a long story short, which he rarely does.\n\nWe must pause now for his Carole King story. Without which he would never have his Paul McCartney story. When Joe was in Congress, from 1995 to 2001, he took great pride in the fact that \"there was nothing lobbyists could do to get my vote. I could not be charmed. But one day Carole King came into my office.\u2026\"\n\nKing, \"a big environmentalist,\" was seeking support for a bill that would protect large swaths of land out west. \"She wanted to nationalize Idaho,\" Joe says, laughing. And he supported that? \"I made a deal with her. I said, 'Sign my guitar and I'll sign your bill.' And I told her, 'Lobbyists can't buy me with money or women or meals or football games or trips to Europe. But if you sign my guitar, I'll sign your bill. It's very simple.'\"\n\nFast-forward. Years later, Carole, now Joe's bud, offers to take him as her date to a McCartney concert. They'll go backstage. Joe will meet his Love Hero. But first, more angst. \"It was strange, but the day before, I started telling Susan, maybe I didn't want to meet my idol. Because I knew this was going to be really, really, uh\u2026\"\n\nEmotional?\n\n\"Frustrating.\"\n\nWhy frustrating?\n\n\"Because I knew I would not be able to let him know how much he had meant to my life, how much joy he had brought to my life.\" Jeez, is he getting misty? \"And even if I could, I knew that anything I told him he would have heard a million times before. So, um, we went backstage, me and Carole, and on the way we saw Jerry Seinfeld, which would be a big thing normally, but if you're going to see Paul McCartney, you could be seeing, like, Queen Elizabeth and that would be an afterthought. So I said, 'Hey, Jerry, I'll get back to you.' And so we go down, and there are a bunch of old rich people who've probably heard three Beatles songs. And of course I was incensed and thought them not worthy to be within a hundred yards of Paul McCartney. Anyway, he came in. He's a very, very, very gracious guy, and it was nice seeing him and Carole together\u2014\"\n\nBut what happened?\n\n\"Well, he was talking to Carole, and I just sort of blurted out how much he meant to me. I said, 'You really mean the world to me. I've always been a fan of yours.' And then somebody shouted from the other side of the room, \"HE'S A REPUBLICAN!\"\n\nThe room fell silent.\n\n\"And I looked at McCartney and sort of shrugged my shoulders\u2026and then they ushered me out of the room. And that was it!\"\n\nMaybe, um, your time was just up?\n\n\"They escorted me out of the room! I felt like a dork in front of my idol. And I just thought, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?\"\n\n\n\nWhich is kind of how Republicans feel about Joe Scarborough these days.\n\nThe rap on Joe is that he's gone all soft and lefty on them. \"A neutered, chickified moderate,\" in the words of Rush Limbaugh. Joe's nice to liberals on his show. The horror! Doesn't scream at them, like you're supposed to. Sometimes he even agrees with them. And it gets worse: He hung out with Alec Baldwin at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Traitor!\n\nJoe finds all of this terribly amusing. \"I'm the most conservative guy at a liberal TV network. And believe it or not, they considered me to be a liberal guy on my radio network [ABC]. Where Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity work. They actually told me, 'We never had a liberal working for us before. It'll be interesting selling advertising.' And I sat there thinking, 'I want to shut down the Department of Education and send all the money back home to the states. Who's more conservative than me?'\"\n\nSo how would you define yourself? As a Reasonable Republican?\n\n\"I don't define myself as a Republican.\" Huh? \"I mean, I don't know what that is right now. I don't know if the Republican Party's gonna survive.\u2026 All the scandals and the money, all the deficits and the debt, the recklessness\u2026\n\n\"And that's the funny thing. When I got to Congress, I was considered one of the really tough, hard-charging conservatives. And somehow I morphed from being this rightwing nut to now being seen as this moderate, mushy, left-leaning Republican. And I'm the same guy! Which may tell you where the Republican Party's gone. They changed for the worst in every way. They haven't become more conservative. They've become more liberal. They've spent us into debt. They've adopted a Woodrow Wilson foreign policy where they want to save the world through democracy, through American blood and treasure. They're not conservative, they're radical! The area where they're seen as conservatives is their rhetoric\u2014where they're harsh. That's where they need to be moderate. We've gotten it wrong. We need to be conservative on spending people's money, but moderate like Reagan on temperament. Reagan didn't hate anybody.\"\n\nHe's sitting in his o!ce at MSNBC, a cramped windowless lair that looks more like a whacked-out dorm room than the office of a network star. He has clearly overcompensated for having only one poster as a child. Every inch of wall is covered. His treasured Roy Lichtenstein print of Bobby Kennedy, signed: \"For Joe, with great respect for your public service.\u2026 Bobby would be proud of you. Your friend, Ted Kennedy.\" His Tim Russert tie that Mike Barnicle gave him when Russert died. A photo of Sarah Palin ripped from GQ. (\"You guys didn't do Sarah any favors with that picture.\") Ronald Reagan's Chesterfield cigarette ad. A note from Chevy Chase: \"To Joe, thanks for my fucking mug.\" The Sgt. Pepper's album cover. Of course. Jack Kennedy, in an iconic campaign photo\u2014which Joe has adorned with stickers of big-boobed women and a thought bubble: \"I love Hooters.\" (Did you do that? \"I did. I respect the Kennedys, but no need to saint anybody.\") His four kids. (His two sons from his first marriage are grown, and he has a 6-year-old and a 2-year-old with Susan.) A warm note from Bush 41. \"He's a great guy, and gracious in a way that his sons aren't.\" A signed photo of him and Bill Clinton that \"always drew big laughs from my liberal friends. They'd say, 'With appreciation for what? Impeaching him?'\" And lots and lots of Hillary\u2014magazine covers, photos, Christmas cards, notes. His sta\" had told me that he has a little crush on her. Does he? \"If I do have a crush on her, that means I'm turned on by competence.\" Do you think it would be better if she had won? \"I do. Because she's a grown-up. Everyone else is a child compared to her. I love her.\"\n\nAnd of course, his guitar signed by Carole King.\n\nJoe does not have a desk in his office. Instead he has an elaborate Pro Tools system to record his music. With much agita, he admits that his biggest regret is that he didn't make a career as a musician: \"I always give people advice to not play it safe, but I always played it safe with my music. Because it means so much to me. I just can't stand it being judged.\" (It takes much cajoling to get Joe to send me a couple of his songs.)\n\nWe return to less painful topics.\n\n\"You know, I used to be most proud of the fact that I got elected to Congress at 31. With no money, no support, no name ID, and with the party establishment working against me. But I actually think, at this point, that I'm more proud of the fact that I have survived at MSNBC. For seven years. It has been a tough ride. There were several people that ran this company, as one booker once told me, who would have put handcu\"s on me and escorted me out of the front doors, if they had their way.\"\n\nBecause of your politics?\n\n\"Because of my politics.\"\n\nHe'd started at the network in the spring of 2003 with Scarborough Country, an evening show he regrets on many levels\u2014particularly his bowing to requests from MSNBC's brass to be more \"aggressive,\" more over-the-top, more Republican. \"Eventually, they loathed me so much that they let me start doing my show down in Pensacola. They hated me so much they didn't want me in the studio!\n\n\"And this will let you know something: Just in case somebody is reading this, a liberal thinking, 'Oh, I love Joe Scarborough,' I'm gonna bring up an issue that will shatter all those myths and make me a hated, loathed man by liberals in your readership.\" (Nah, we don't have any of those.) \"I'm not gonna give you names [we will: Rick Kaplan], but a certain ecutive was always encouraging me, 'Tell us what you're thinking, put it out on the line, be more aggressive!' And so one Easter weekend, during the Terri Schiavo deal, they said, 'We want you to do a two-hour special on Terri Schiavo.' And I said, 'Okay, but I just want to warn you, I'm kind of strange on this one, and I don't think people know the whole story.' And they said, 'Oh, go out, give it your all!' So I just kept bringing up the fact that there were five doctors appointed by the court that looked at Terri Schiavo, and two of the five said that she had brain activity and could recover. Three said she didn't. This wasn't Joe the Conservative. This was Joe the Dad, who saw the two parents who wanted to take care of their daughter, and saw this husband, this redneck husband, who wanted to do what he wanted to do and go on with his life. And so I went on that night, and I brought up these things. And some people at MSNBC were outraged. Said I made a fool of the network. I actually had people trying to fire me. Al Franken was writing letters. Al Franken the comedian\u2014that was pre-Senate days\u2014demanding that I be fired.\"\n\n\n\nJust a few years later, even Hollywood liberals have fallen for Joe. In May, when Sarah Jessica Parker appeared on the program, she proclaimed that she was a \"devotee\" who has \"chastised people for not starting their day right here.\" A skeptical Scarborough retorted with \"How much do I irritate you?\" \"Oh no, no,\" said SJP. \"What brought me to the show was how surprising you were. Because I had an idea about your political ideology\u2026but you have revealed yourself to be a far more nuanced and interesting thinker.\" Bingo.\n\nOn abortion: \"That's just not my business.\" On gay marriage: \"Why do I care what two men are doing in Des Moines, Iowa? Let the Supreme Court and the legislature sort that out.\" But if you were making the decision? \"I think I'm more libertarian. And I understand all of the concerns that everybody has. On both sides. But I don't obsess over it. It's just none of my business. I'm not o\"ended if Alabama wants to ban gay marriage and ban abortions, and I'm not o\"ended if New York wants to permit it.\"\n\nWhen Joe left Congress in 2001, people were shocked. Who leaves Congress at the age of 38? \"I quit because I had a 14-yearold son [Joey] who needed me.\" Joe's other son, who was 11 at the time, has diabetes and Asperger's and stayed with his mother, Joe's ex-wife. \"Joey needed his dad; he needed a strong presence in his life. And I still to this day\u2026 I carry deep things with me. These so-called family-values people really didn't understand about my son and about my family.\" The only person who reached out to Joe and offered to help with his kids was Ted Kennedy.\n\nLeaving Congress, particularly with his troubled son, was the hardest time in Joe's life. \"I went from having an 85 percent approval rating in my district and being just beloved, to the next day getting out of Congress and being loathed by my closest supporters for not continuing my political career.\"\n\nEverybody wants to know: Will Scarborough run for o!ce again? (He gives excellent nondenial denials.) There are even those who'd like to see him run for president in 2012. \"We are in uncharted political waters,\" says Republican strategist Mark McKinnon, \"and Joe Scarborough could be the X factor. He's a genuine conservative but not a knee-jerk. A jerk sometimes, yes, but a lovable one. Yet he'll surprise by taking centrist stands on some issues that don't square up with the base. He's where most of America is. The challenge is that the system today is rigged for the fringes. But Joe is a di\"erent kind of cat, and the country is looking for something different, something real and authentic. Like a redneck from Florida with great communications skills that can sell in Manhattan\u2014or Iowa or New Hampshire. And he plays guitar.\"\n\nBut then he'd have to give up Morning Joe.\n\n\n\nThe show was entirely Joe's idea. He had this crazy notion that viewers wanted something more civilized than the usual screamfests, that they wanted to hear about news, not Lindsay Lohan or the Balloon Boy. \"I knew there had to be a lot of people like me who wanted news and intelligent conversation without the vitriol.\" What he had in mind was exactly what it's turned into: the kind of stimulating breakfast conversation anyone might have about the news, if anyone could have the smartest journalists, politicians, and celebrities over for breakfast.\n\nHe honed his idea for Morning Joe into a proposal that he whipped up at Kinko's. And when Don Imus got his ass canned for calling the Rutgers women's basketball players \"nappy-headed hos,\" he pounced. Joe's formula was brilliant in its simplicity. There would be no teleprompter, no pitting of left-wing loonies against rightwing loonies, and most important, no screaming. He would only have guests \"who didn't act like they were on TV.\" (And if they did, they weren't invited back.) There would be cool music. And a co-host who wasn't a bubblehead.\n\nThree years later, with Morning Joe's ratings beating CNN's American Morning (but still a distant second to Fox Friends) and with everyone trying to copy Morning Joe (GMA has a very lame knocko\" roundtable segment; CNN's imminent Eliot Spitzer show sounds suspiciously like MJ), it's amusing to hear about the resistance Joe and his co-host, Mika Brzezinski, had to overcome to produce the show as Joe envisioned it. Everything was a battle, including the hiring of his best friend, a talented producer named Chris Licht, as ecutive producer. \"They thought I was too young,\" says Licht. (He was 35.) They wanted a seasoned \"morning show\" person, which is precisely what Scarborough didn't want. But Mika was an even bigger battle. So unsure were they of her that for over a year after the launch of MJ\u2014a year in which anyone could see that the chemistry between Mika and Joe was priceless\u2014they still weren't paying her a full-time salary. They wanted someone with \"more hair than brains,\" Joe recalls.\n\nAs The New York Times pointed out, Mika and Joe are like co-stars in a romantic comedy. Perhaps what the Times really meant was that there is\u2014let's just say it\u2014sexual energy between them. (Despite the fact that he calls her \"Mommy,\" or perhaps because of it.)\n\nOne evening last winter, Joe and Mika and the gang gather in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton in D.C., where Joe and Susan and the kids have a suite. Their 6-year-old, Kate, bounces off the elevator first, followed by Joe and Susan and Mika (in her usual four-inch-plus heels) and the Morning Joe team. That would include Chris Licht, who suffered a brain hemorrhage in April (he's fine now) and Louis Burgdorf, the 24-yearold hottie who serves as Joe's assistant and got the job by literally stalking Licht. \"That's what you want as your assistant, a stalker,\" says Joe.\n\nThey pile into SUVs and drive to Politics and Prose, Washington's most crunchy-lib bookstore, where there are people lined up around the block to meet Joe and Mika. Mika is promoting her memoir, All Things at Once, and Joe, being Joe (and superconscious of The Brand), escorts her to most of her book signings (as she did with his). \"At every stop,\" says Joe, \"they just thank us. They say, 'Thank you for just talking. Thank you for not screaming.'\"\n\nInside P and P, there is much fuss made when Mika's elderly but hip mother shows up in jeans and boots. (Her father, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national-security adviser for President Carter, once called Joe's knowledge of an issue \"stunningly superficial.\") Joe does a funny bit on meeting the Brzezinskis and afterward spends two hours signing autographs. \"I can't start my day without you.\" \"I don't agree with you, but I respect what you're doing\"\u2014and so on. Then one fan approaches the table and squeals, \"You should be husband and wife!\"\n\n\"We are,\" deadpans Mika.\n\nThey stay till 11 p.m. But at five thirty-five the next morning they are on the set in the D.C. studio, ready to work. Joe is sucking down a frozen Starbucks coffee on four hours of sleep. Mika says, \"Add an hour on each end for hair and makeup and you have my life.\" When the cameras roll at 6 a.m., they speak their own sign language, slipping notes to each other, delivering instructions with barely a glance. Today they have Hillary Clinton and Valerie Jarrett on. There are few people who will turn down Morning Joe these days. Rahm Emanuel is one of them. \"He went on before he became chief of sta\",\" says Joe. \"But he won't come on now, because I said for a week on the air that he was a terrible choice for Obama, and he took it very personally.\" (Rahm? Shocking.) \"You don't pick the meanest man in Washington, D.C., the most partisan man in Washington, D.C., the man who sends dead fish to political opponents, and make him the most important person in your White House. That's not how you become a transcendent political figure.\"\n\nBack in the control room, Licht is doing his thing, ranting in their ears. \"Fuck, Mika, fuck.\" He wants to know what her problem is this morning. \"Are you mad at the news or someone in here?\" asks Licht.\n\n\"I'm mad at the news.\"\n\nAt one point, he tells her to \"watch your body language\" when she has her hands folded across her chest. Then CNN is slow to release Hillary, who is supposed to be live on Morning Joe\u2014like, now. \"I'm gonna fucking punch John Roberts myself,\" says Licht. \"Fuck, they're giving it to us a minute and a half late. Fucking assholes.\" He instructs another producer to tell Fox News, where Hillary is going next, that she may be a bit late, \"because unlike CNN, I'm not a douchebag!\" Then he starts flipping out because there's only one feed from Haiti and it's going to the freaking Today show.\n\nIf you see Joe suppressing laughter on-air now and then, this is what he's hearing in his earpiece.\n\n\n\nA few months later, Joe and Mika are strolling through the meatpacking district in Manhattan, posing for pictures. Those fabulous glam shots of the two of them that are interspersed at commercial breaks? Also part of Joe's original master plan. His wife found the photographer, Evelyn Laws, in Pensacola, where she used to photograph fruit. Joe flies her up to refresh the shots on a regular basis. Can't let anything get stale.\n\nThey break for lunch with the team at Macelleria, \"a Republican steak house,\" the fawning owner tells Joe.\n\n\"Are you serious? What's a Republican restaurant in the meatpacking district?\" He looks at the menu. \"What should I get, Mommy?\" he asks Mika, who is drinking straight vodka at noon. She orders for him.\n\n\"Stop it,\" she says, slapping his hand away from his iPhone. \"Stop it now.\" She's chastising him for tweeting, which she thinks he's becoming obsessive about.\n\nWe move on to the news, including rumors of the departure of his pal Rahm.\n\n\"Maybe now he'll come back on the show,\" cracks Joe.\n\nSpeaking of dream guests, is there anyone he's ever wanted that he couldn't get? Any prime minister or religious leader or big thinker?\n\nJoe looks stunned. \"Paul McCartney!\"\n\nLisa DePaulo is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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