Benjamin J. Myers/Corbis/ Mark Peterson/Redux
Jean Richardson was in her mid-30s when Walter Cronkite debuted on U.S. national television. The 84-year-old Connecticut woman has since watched a pantheon of “most trusted newscasters” cross her TV screen—names like Brokaw, Jennings and Rather among them. They were all fine, she says, if you didn’t mind the affected solemnity of television’s bygone age. But Glenn Beck? Now there’s a man she trusts. “I know he’s a good person, I know he’s honest and sincere,” she says. “I can tell in the first 30 seconds whether I like someone, and I picked it up from him right away.”
Richardson is tall, with an elegance undercut only by the bottle of Coors Light trembling in her hand. Tonight she is waiting in the corridor of the Mohegan Sun Arena, a 12,000-seat auditorium in central Connecticut where the man she trusts is due to appear in person, alongside his fellow Fox TV host Bill O’Reilly. Tickets were $80 and up, and the arena is located at the centre of a vast, native-owned casino complex, meaning Richardson and her son Scott had to navigate a sea of slot machines on their way to the show.
Scott, who is 57, has recently fallen on hard times. A carpenter by trade, he’s had trouble finding work in New England’s flagging construction industry, and has taken a $10-an-hour job greeting customers at Wal-Mart. He’s got as much right as anyone to work up a rage, but he’s not here to protest. “I appreciate how he talks about history,” he says. “Glenn researches his topics and can back up what he says with historical fact.”
Broadcaster, teacher, performer, leader. Glenn Beck’s multiple personas have made him a confusing target for liberal critics, who have sought to brand him as everything from a loose cannon to a right-wing insurgent. Each night on Fox, and for three hours each day on his syndicated radio program, the 46-year-old former DJ serves up his unique stew of politics, paranoia, humour and faith, drawing new epithets from the “progressives” he says are ruining America. But what they can’t call him is a failure. In just under two years, Beck has gone from garden-variety radio blowhard to a political personality capable of filling Washington’s central Mall with adoring spectators who deliriously cheered his anti-tax, anti-government message of self-sufficiency.
In the process, he has shattered assumptions about what you can do on television. Beck’s nightly attacks on the Obama administration were so strident that establishment Republicans warned they would render the party unelectable, leaving only a rump of Tea Party radicals who share his ideas. Instead, Beck took Tea Party historical theory to a wider audience, building the electoral constituency the GOP brain trust feared would whither away. Online lectures he has dubbed “Beck U” include readings on the founding documents of the United States, and hammer away on his favourite theme: the founding fathers, inspired by God, equated big, central government with tyranny. In Beck’s world, Washington is the enemy of freedom.
That his version of U.S. history is at best selective, or that he never went to university, doesn’t much matter. Beck has resonated on a level no one predicted—least of all elders of the Grand Old Party. Victories for Tea Party-backed Republicans in many congressional races in this week’s mid-term elections helped return control of the House to the GOP, a resurgence for which even Beck’s most committed critics can’t deny him some credit.
Now, as once-safe Democrats stream out of Washington in stunned disbelief, Beck’s doubters have been left to ponder his role in the new political order. He’s emphatically denied interest in running for office himself. But his endorsement has played no small role in bringing Sarah Palin back to prominence, setting the vice-presidential candidate up for a run at the White House in 2012. There is Democratic blood in the water, and one suspects Beck has only begun to feed.
Say this for the man: he knows how to make an entrance. As the lights go down at Mohegan Sun, Beck strides from the arena’s southeast corner wearing robes, a golden crown and white tights. It’s the night before Halloween, and for this sedate, mostly grey crowd, the spectacle of their hero dressed as an 18th-century English monarch is all they need. “I told the people at the costume store to dress me like a progressive Democrat,” Beck says, arms raised. All 11,000 are on their feet.
He normally underwhelms with his physical presence—brush-headed and doughy, like a nerdy version of Biff from Back to the Future. So the king shtick serves as both self-parody and a portal to gags, as he falls into the character of prominent liberal foes who aspire to royalty: John Kerry is a drawling courtier demanding that you kiss his ring; George Soros is a megalomaniac secretly plotting world domination. It’s all-out vaudeville, drawing on mimicry Beck honed during his former life on morning zoo radio, broken only when O’Reilly takes the stage for his own much tamer segment of the show.
Beck will return after an intermission in jeans and a sloppy button-down—a costume that better reflects his blue-collar upbringing. His parents owned a bakery in Mount Vernon, Wash., but lost the business and divorced when he was in his early teens. Two years later, his mother, an alcoholic, drowned off Tacoma in what was ruled a boating accident but which Beck remains convinced was a suicide pact with a man she was dating, who died at the scene as well.
Shattered but determined to make his way, Beck found a home in private radio, taking DJ gigs in middle markets from Provo, Utah, to Louisville, Ky., while running on a treadmill of liquor and drugs. Cindy Civitello, a lifelong Republican from central Connecticut, remembers his run at WKCI in Hamden, Conn., where he eventually hit bottom. “He could be very nasty on the air, with the pranks and everything,” she recalls. Yet even then he showed an uncommon capacity to rally people for a cause, Civitello says, as when he and his morning crew launched a charity drive called “Stuff-a-bus.” Each Thanksgiving, listeners were invited to cram a school bus full of frozen turkeys and other donations for needy families. The campaign lasts to this day.
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