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.