Michael in the Middle

The more we say something, the more it becomes easy to say. Since Michael Smerconish has been answering questions about his place in the middle of the political spectrum for quite some time, and how moderation absolutely does not–under any circumstances–make him any less strident, he is quite polished and rehearsed when talking about that subject. What we need here is something to switch the narrative.

So, what was it like writing a novel?

A smile. A lean. Now, we have real engagement. Smerconish is quite familiar with the electoral and legislative arenas. He lives there. Forget his address in Philadelphia’s Main Line. Smerconish is immersed in the fray, warding off the criticisms of the right, whose members rail at him for abandoning the Republican Party for what they consider the milquetoast of independence, and sparring with the left and its refusal to sanctify anyone who dares embrace even part of the Other Side.
Smerconish knows the middle. It’s his world. So, discussing the issues–and more specifically his approach to them–brings a practiced response. It’s not robotic, mind you, just well rehearsed. You would expect the same from a physician asked to discuss a procedure he has performed hundreds of times. Or from a musician fielding a request to play a timeworn chestnut.

But writing fiction? Now, that’s outside of Smerconish’s established, comfortable boundaries. And it clearly excites him. In May, his first novel, Talk, hit the stores and online outlets, and though it can be considered as a literary extension of his brand, it was still new ground and therefore exciting for him.
“I am so proud of this book,” Smerconish says. “It was the hardest thing that I have written.”

These are high times for Smerconish, whose new book is the sixth he has written (the other five were nonfiction), and whose radio show on SiriusXM attracts a big audience for the satellite broadcaster. In March, he began a one-hour Saturday morning show on CNN, Smerconish, that finally provides his own television platform and even led to a one-week tryout for the CNN spot Piers Morgan vacated. He continues to write a Sunday column for The Philadelphia Inquirer. And this summer, he was approached about turning the book, Talk, into a TV series. Smerconish and his wife, Lavinia, have four kids in whose lives they are quite entwined. Yet, he still has time to enjoy a cigar at the end of every day, although it’s a wonder he doesn’t fall asleep while smoking it. This is a busy man.

“When he gets really crazy, he starts looking at things in half-day segments, instead of looking at next month,” says his executive producer, TC Scornavacchi. “He’ll plan things over a couple days when he can, but mostly he has to take little steps.”

Busy is good when you are 52 years old and trying to squeeze as much from life as you can. And no one can accuse Smerconish of not trying to wring everything possible from his. He has cultivated a professional persona that allows him to perform on several different media platforms, and each year seems to bring new and more impressive success.

Talk radio is his primary outlet–at least for now. Fifteen years ago, he was working two hours a day on the air in Philadelphia. Today on SiriusXM, he addresses a good chunk of the company’s 26 million paying customers on the POTUS (Politics of the United States) channel and is quickly becoming one of the nation’s most influential commentators. The main reason is that Smerconish refuses to conform to the right-wing talk radio stereotype that prevails on many stations. And he certainly won’t bow to the left, either. Only recently has that come to define him in a positive manner.

“Talk radio has not fulfilled its potential, because it is filled with a generation of Rush Limbaugh wanna-bes, who think it’s about monologue, not dialogue,” says Rhode Island-based media consultant Holland Cooke. “Smerconish is refreshing. And you can have him on with kids in the car.”

Smerconish’s satellite radio presence is impressive, but it doesn’t afford him the same kind of national exposure as television. His CNN show is an opportunity for him to craft his own TV product, instead of conforming to the strictures of someone else’s world, as he did while filling in for Bill O’Reilly, Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough. Smerconish had been something of a double agent, able to work at both right-leaning Fox News and lefty MSNBC without having war declared upon him by either extreme of the political spectrum. There were days when he would do a show at Fox and take a short walk to Rockefeller Center to appear later on MSNBC. Very few people could do that–and it has nothing to do with the energy needed to keep up the schedule.

“I was able to be the Switzerland of the media world for a while, and I would joke at the time that I didn’t know if I was going to get shot in the back or shot in the chest as I would traverse those two or three blocks,” he says.

Smerconish insists that he is not Stan Powers, the protagonist of Talk.

“But I’ve lived a lot of what Stan Powers experiences,” he says.

Since first-time novelists are always exhorted to “write what they know,” it made perfect sense that Smerconish’s debut would bring the reader into the dual worlds of politics and talk radio. Not that he would have been out of bounds covering the law, since he spent a decade as a litigator and provided legal commentary to CNN, before his radio  career and tenure as America’s guest host on Fox and MSNBC. Powers is an FM disc jockey who switches formats and gains national popularity by surrendering to his baser instincts and becoming ever more extreme. He impacts elections with his relentless attacks on candidates he doesn’t favor and finally faces a personal crisis when he has an opportunity to take down the Democratic contender in the presidential election.

It took Smerconish four years to write Talk, largely because carving out enough time to build the momentum necessary to complete substantial sections was not easy. “It was really a struggle,” he says. Smerconish wasn’t aiming to craft a bit of literature that will become part of English classes’ syllabi for years to come. He sees himself standing at the confluence of Dan Jenkins’ Semi-Tough and Joe Klein’s Primary Colors. Given the success of those two authors, that’s a good place to hang out. He has accomplished his goal with Talk. It is an engaging read with a brisk plot and interesting characters. And it is funny.

“I want people to laugh out loud, and I want them to say, ‘You know, he’s right. This really is out of control,’” Smerconish says. “[The book] has a real serious message on the [political] climate, which dovetails on everything else … the CNN show, what I do on SiriusXM. It’s all consistent.”

That consistency is the important thing for Smerconish now. After more than a decade of trying to have all aspects of his career flowing in the same direction, he has finally achieved that goal. It began with the move to SiriusXM from a syndicated, Philadelphia-based “terrestrial” radio model. That freed him from a talk-radio world that Cooke calls a “punchline” and “a caricature personified”–a landscape dominated by shrill voices that mandate full audience fealty. Smerconish was heard on about 80 stations nationally, most of which were predominantly right wing in nature.

“[Moving to satellite] was a sea change to a different demographic,” says Smerconish, who made a well-publicized break with the party in 2010, two years after supporting Barack Obama in the ’08 election. “[Listeners] are paying for it, so they have to be of a certain income level, and they’re educated. And at least those I’m dealing with, they respond to non-doctrinaire dialogue.”

Smerconish is the rare talk-radio host who doesn’t mind give-and-take with his audience. He won’t allow listeners to hijack a show segment with a diatribe, but he will suffer critics and makes an effort to maintain a civilized tone, even with those who disagree vehemently with him. This reasoned approach, while not popular with the scorched-earth crowd, allows Smerconish to attract a collection of A-list guests. In 2009, he even broadcast live from the White House. And when Republican Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan came to Philadelphia’s Union League in August to promote his book, Smerconish hosted the event and gave Ryan the room to discuss his point of view. When he interviews people, he does so to advance the discussion, not to pillory. Smerconish is known as fair, and when he doesn’t know something, he won’t bluster. He’ll try to find an answer. His show has a big tent feel to it, something that he believes more accurately represents America, even if the edges of the spectrum make the most noise.

I want people to laugh out loud, and I want them to say, ‘You know, he’s right. This really is out of control.’- Michael Smerconish

“People are allowed to have opinions on his show and can believe one way or the other,” says David Goreb, the vice president and general manager of talk programming at SiriusXM. “They don’t have to beat up on the president or follow the pack.

“But anyone who describes Michael as wishy-washy doesn’t know Michael. Michael, if you look at his core, decided to be honest.”

Smerconish can be vehement when he wants to be. Take his support for the widow of slain Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and his strenuous opposition to any lessening of the sentence handed down to Faulkner’s convicted killer, Mumia Abu-Jamal. In March, one of his Philadelphia Inquirer columns called for an end of the SAT and used his own troubles with the test and subsequent success at Lehigh and the University of Pennsylvania Law School as evidence that the test is not an accurate indicator of a student’s future success. “Somehow, [a college] application has got to enable someone, anyone, to say, ‘I’ve got a lot more things going on here than that B or B-minus that you may be looking at,” he says.

Smerconish had a chance to check out today’s college world when he returned to Lehigh in March to address journalism students in the Journalism 122 course, which covers media, law and ethics. At first, he thought he would be presiding over the “Jokes” class, a journalism primer that carried the same course number while he was at Lehigh and which was taught by beloved department chairman Joe McFadden. “McFadden was this classic Lehigh personality,” Smerconish says. “No matter what you were majoring in, you wanted to make sure at some point at Lehigh you registered for ‘Jokes.’”

The invitation to speak allowed Smerconish to talk about polarization in the media and the political arena. He spoke about the reasons for the current climate and how the media has mirrored the nation’s capital by creating a divergence that allows for less and less rational discussion. Smerconish was cheered by the fact that the students asked a lot of questions and seemed engaged.

“The reason I’m so passionate about that subject is that I think the industries in which I work are the ones that are responsible, specifically talk radio and cable television news,” he says. “In the span of 45 minutes, I tried to explain to them the way in which those businesses have changed, and how they changed at the exact same time that Washington has become more polarized.”

Smerconish’s CNN show provides a televised version of his radio program and continues his quest to civilize the discussion on issues. He’s happy to be on what he considers to be neutral ground, after splitting his TV time between the left and right camps. CNN is happy to let him do it. Speaking in early February, when Smerconish’s new show was announced, network president Jeff Zucker said, “At a time when the cable news landscape has become increasingly polarized, his independence and passion for reasoned dialogue makes him the perfect fit for CNN.” About a month after his CNN show was announced, Smerconish learned he would get a week’s “tryout” in the evening slot vacated recently by Piers Morgan.

In other words, there is no denying Smerconish’s growing influence and success. He has grabbed the middle tightly and is using every medium at his disposal to draw Americans away from the fringes and into the mainstream, where he believes progress can be made. Partisanship has been confused with passion, and that’s anathema to him. Smerconish moves forward confident in the fact that he is true to himself—and he honestly believes he can find some answers that will lead to an end of the shrill climate that prevails.

“The opinions that I offer, the right ones and the wrong ones, they’re all heartfelt,” he says. “I’ve never tailored my speech to where I think an audience exists. It’s more a function of, ‘This is what I believe, and by the way, I think many people feel the same way I do.’”

Story by Michael Bradley

Photos courtesy of CNN