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Hewitt in his studio, from the story in National Journal. Photo: Slav Zatoka.
I haven't mentioned Hugh Hewitt, the SoCal-based conservative talk-show host, here in a while. But he's bigger than ever. Hewitt is "having a moment," the National Journal's Shane Goldmacher says in a new profile. He has recently represented the center-right on "Meet the Press," he was named as one of the questioners for an upcoming series of Republican presidential candidates on CNN, and he has been breaking news about the Republican candidates on his national radio show. Jeb Bush picked Hewitt's show for his recent coming out as a likely candidate. From the story:
He sees radio journalism as a means to a political end. He talks about "my business, my passion—which is to build a better America using my platforms as a means of doing that, impacting politics in the right way." He was an outspoken Romney backer in 2008 and 2012, but this cycle, he says, "I have no dog in this hunt." Instead, he has cultivated friendships in nearly every campaign, if not with every principal. When Sen. Ted Cruz came to Los Angeles to meet with a group of Romney bundlers last year, it was Hewitt who moderated the event. "Rick Santorum, he trusts me. I think Rand Paul trusts me. Ted trusts me. Scott Walker I've sat down with a number of times. [John] Kasich is a friend," Hewitt says. "But I'll ask them the toughest question I know how to ask."
He gets the chance because almost all of them appear on his show. In the last week or so, he'd had Bush on, plus Sen. Lindsey Graham and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Donald Trump had stopped by and Hewitt had asked about his reading habits, eliciting a tongue-twisting answer that began, "Well, I read a lot," and ended with, "I just don't get to read very much." Says Hewitt, "I have credibility with just about everyone that I'm not going to blow them up"—at least not unfairly. Or, as Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus puts it, "It goes down to trust."But it's not only conservatives who seem to trust him. When David Axelrod, President Obama's longtime chief strategist, went on the publicity circuit to promote his recent book, his first conservative talk-radio stop was with Hewitt. (Fox's Bill O'Reilly was Axelrod's first conservative TV appearance.) "Let's be honest—and this isn't limited to talk radio on the Right—there are those for whom the answers are just interludes for them to catch their breath between questions. I think he asks questions genuinely in pursuit of answers," Axelrod told me. "We live in a time where it is very hard for people to reach across the chasm and make connections with folks on the other side and treat each other like people, and I felt like Hugh did." Axelrod stayed on the show for more than an hour.
Hewitt—who grew up in Warren, Ohio—may be comfortable with liberals in part because he has been surrounded by them since his college days at Harvard, where his roommates included Mark Gearan, who would go on to serve as President Clinton's communications director, and Dan Poneman, who served as deputy Energy secretary under President Obama. "If you've got lefties in your life, you're not going to hate liberals," Hewitt says. "They're just people. They're just wrong."
Goldmacher says of Hewitt that "if Republican pundits fall on a scale from the bombastic right-winger Rush Limbaugh on one end to the civilized centrist David Brooks on the other, then Hewitt is Limbaugh-like in his ideology but Brooks-like in his presentation. In other words, he's an intellectual's ideologue."
Things you may not have known: Gearan and Hewitt remain best friends. He was law school classmates at Michigan with Anne Gust, the wife of Jerry Brown, and says if she ran for the Senate "I might actually support a Democrat." Hewitt thinks Gust should run for governor and that Condoleezza Rice should run statewide too. He came to California to run the Nixon presidential library and became a co-host of KCET's "Life and Times." His son James Hewitt is a deputy press secretary for the Republican National Committee. Christopher Hitchens frequently guested on Hewitt's radio show and sometimes stayed the full three hours.
