On Line

You’ve heard of Power Line, haven’t you? The three neocon lawyers who blogged down Dan Rather? John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson, and Paul Mirengoff are fiftysomething lawyers who graduated from Dartmouth within a couple of years of each other—Hinderaker met Mirengoff on the debate team and they became roommates, Johnson met Hinderaker at Faegre & Benson. Hinderaker and Johnson now live in the Twin Cities. (Mirengoff lives in Washington, D.C.)

The trio launched Power Line Blog in May 2002 and made their bones commenting on the Wellstone– Coleman race that summer and fall. Then, in 2004, in a blog post titled “The Sixty-First Minute,” the Power Line lawyers made their famous case against a Dan Rather story broadcast on 60 Minutes II about President Bush’s service record. The blog post eventually cost Rather his job, and Time lauded Power Line as its first and only “Blog of the Year.” With regular assists from right-wing pundits such as talk radio host Hugh Hewitt, their website now boasts 60,000 to 80,000 daily visitors—an active reading community that has broken news and contributed sources in its own right.

Recently, I sat down twice with John Hinderaker, the trio’s self-proclaimed “techie,” and talked to him about blogging for the most famous conservative blog in the world.

If you’re a neocon, you must’ve gone through a hippie phase at some point, right?
One thing that the three of us have in common is that we all started out on the left. So we made the long march, ideologically speaking, from left to right over a long period of time. Paul was arrested for participating in an SDS takeover of one of the buildings at Dartmouth in 1969. I voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Lemme guess—you got sick of paying taxes?
Yeah, that actually was part of it—my wife became a conservative the day she first saw our joint tax return. But no one remembers what was being said [during the Carter years]—that the country is in decline, get used to it, that’s the way it’s going to be. Sophisticated financial people were saying inflation would rise 10 percent a year in perpetuity, our foreign affairs were a disaster, communism was advancing . . . .

So when was the first time you crossed the aisle in the booth? When you voted for Reagan?
No, in 1980 I voted for John Anderson. I thought Reagan was still kind of a dangerous radical. So 1984 would be the first time I actually voted Republican, at least presidentially.

When did you start writing with Scott Johnson?
Scott and I started writing together around 1990, when we were both at Faegre. A lot of what we wrote in those early years was about economics. There was kind of a cottage industry that started up in the late eighties, early nineties, that was an attempt to discredit the remarkable achievements of the Reagan administration—notably a book called America: What Went Wrong? by a couple of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists in Philadelphia. I was really taken aback by that, because having lived through that sequence of events it was clear that Reagan had really saved the American economy. You had to be a fool not to see that.

Why did you decide to submit op-ed pieces?
When Scott and I started writing, one of the first principles that we worked from was that there’s no reason in the world why anybody should care about our opinion—I mean, who cares? And so one of the hallmarks of all the writing we did is that we would always present a solid core of facts. A lot of the stuff early on was about economics, so we presented economic data. Maybe it wasn’t always statistics, but we would present facts and we would draw inferences and argue from it. And if somebody doesn’t agree with our premises or doesn’t like the conclusions we’re drawing, that’s fine, but at least they’ll see the facts. We never just spout off or rant.

But you seem to have an instinct for the well-timed rhetorical bomb, at least on Power Line. And you never equivocate—you’re forcefully advocating a certain ideological point of view.
Oh, absolutely. We are unapologetic. There are various ways you can describe us, one is “conservative activists.” And that’s a description that I wouldn’t at all shy away from, and that’s one of the things that guides what we write about and what we say. But we’re independent. It wouldn’t be fair to say that we’re members of a team—we disagree and say what we think. The minute you stop saying what you think is the minute you start wasting your time. With a hobby like ours, if you’re not going to say what you think, then what the hell are you doing it for?

No offense, but you’re fifty-seven years old. Why did you decide to write a blog?
I’m not crazy about the term blogger. I never call myself that, and my guess is that in ten years we will not be hearing that word. Anyway—by 2002, Scott and I had been writing together for ten years. And we’d grown sort of frustrated with the media, with the 750-word space, and the fact that you need to wrestle with the deadline every time you write a piece and then by the time it runs a week later no one cares anymore. And by 2001, I had become an Internet junkie and thought that it was a pretty cool thing.

Did you have any role models starting out?
Andrew Sullivan was an inspiration, of course, and Stephen den Beste’s USS Clueless blog came in at about exactly the same time as ours, but he’s not around anymore. It didn’t take me very long to figure out that this could be a good medium for Scott and me to work in because you can just do it when you have time. If you’ve got something to say and it takes only a hundred words—fine, there it is. I really like the flexibility of the medium and the speed.

How much time do you spend on your blog?
People ask us how we find time to do this and there are lots of different answers to that question, but one of the answers is, we can write really fast. One of the things a lawyer has to be able to do is bang stuff out relatively quickly and have it be careful and accurate. We spend probably an average of two hours apiece on the website.

Two hours apiece writing?
Two hours apiece total—six hours total between the three of us. I average an hour and a half a day just reading stuff.

Online?
Oh, 100 percent online. Usually, I’ll start doing some reading early in the morning while I’m getting ready for work. I’ve got the laptop next to my sink and I’ll be shaving and reading the newspapers. Then during the day, it just depends on what I’m doing. If I’m taking a deposition or something, I can’t do it, but if I’m in the office, I might look at the highlights, check out the new headlines to see what’s going on, and if there’s something I think I could try to comment on, I’ll post something.

I want to get back to the idea of “conservative activism.” Isn’t there a risk of Power Line becoming an echo chamber, a place where like-minded people seek out what they want to hear?
That risk is there, but it’s not only there on the Web. In fact, I’ve seen studies—I’m not sure they’re right—that purport to show that on the Web people are more likely to be reading opposing points of view than they are in newspapers or magazines. The guy who subscribes to National Review doesn’t subscribe to The Nation. Online, it’s easier to click back and forth between different points of view.

You’ve said that you consider your site to be competing with mainstream journalism.
In some respects.

Then what’s the mainstream media’s primary purpose?
To inform the readers of the newspapers. Good old-fashioned, straightforward, objective news reporting has tremendous value. If I had to choose between all reporting and no commentary and all commentary and no reporting, I’d say to hell with the commentary, give me the reporting. Commentary ought to be the second stage. Straight news reporting digs out facts, organizes them, puts them on the table, and other people should be arguing about what they mean—what conclusions we should draw, how they relate to other facts that are reported someplace else.

The profession of journalism got screwed up beginning in the early 1970s or so. A whole generation of people went into journalism because they wanted to change the world. A generation of reporters wanted to spend their time not telling what the facts are in as fair and objective way as they can, but telling you what they mean and what conclusions we should draw from them and why their ultimate import is that you should vote for a Democrat next time. There’s way too much of that going on. I think it would be good to have a cleaner separation between news reporting and news commentary. One of the problems is that lots of reporters [feel] that guys like us are having all the fun. That they’re stuck with the boring stuff, that it would be more fun to be a commentator. I don’t know, I’m not sure if it’s more fun or not, but I understand why they might think that.

Could you see a dramatic shift in your tone if a Democrat wins this election?
Our sources of information would be a little bit different—we have had friendly relationships with people in the administration. So we’ll have to work out a little bit different relationship there because, like I say, in general our tone has been supportive toward the administration, with very important exceptions. If we find ourselves writing about a Democratic administration, we’ll have to work out how to handle that tone. When we can support them, find good things, we want to encourage that. We don’t want to be naysayers and nothing but critics, but we’ll also try to ride herd on them as best we can.

One thing you won’t see with us is the insane hate you see on the left for the Bush administration. Where does it come from? I don’t know. You hear all sorts of different explanations—some people think it has a lot to do with the fact that Bush is religious. I’m sure that theory has some truth to it. Some of it has to do with—well, talk about an echo chamber, go to a site like the Daily Kos or Democratic Underground. By the way, I don’t really do that. I think I’ve looked at Daily Kos twice in my life. I’ve looked at the Democratic Underground more than that, but not many times more. But just based on the experience I’ve had with those kinds of sites, these people try to egg each other on. It’s like a beehive, and the bees are all buzzing, and there are only bees. They don’t look at an opposing moderating viewpoint. That’s part of it—just the way a lot of these Internet activists, in particular, are set up, where they function, where they organize themselves, lends itself to this kind of endless reinforcement, this ever-growing rage.

Also part of it is that, while demographically Democrats probably skew elderly more than they skew anything else, on the Web a lot of those people are young. And when I think back to the soundness of my political judgment when I was, you know, twenty years old, it wasn’t all that great.

Steve Marsh is Mpls.St.Paul Magazine staff writer.