Morning in America

Where else could a red-meat, right-wing congressman like Joe Scarborough reinvent himself as the liberal’s favorite talk-show host?

By Mark Binelli
New York Magazine
Published Jul 13, 2008

Joe Scarborough was walking in his neighborhood, near 66th and Broadway, one afternoon this spring when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Harry Smith, the avuncular co-host of CBS’ The Early Show.

“How ya doin’?” Scarborough asked.

“You never get used to it,” Smith said. “I’ve been doing this for twenty years. And you never get used to it.” Then he walked away.

“We’d never even met before,” Scarborough tells me. “He was like the Angel of Death!”

Scarborough loves this story, which he tells to illustrate how much he despises waking up early. On this particular morning, he’s been up since four, surfing the Internet at his apartment and maintaining BlackBerry contact with his producer and co-hosts. He arrives for work at 30 Rockefeller Plaza at a quarter to six—fifteen minutes before his show, Morning Joe, airs live—and takes a seat at a bar stool behind a long silver table. He’s a big man: six foot four, with handsome, blocky features. His deep-set eyes are small relative to the size of his head and can look unflatteringly beady when he’s tired, like raisins sinking into dough. An assistant brings him a Starbucks Venti iced latte.

Despite his complaints about the hours, Scarborough lobbied hard for this job, which opened up in April 2007 when Don Imus made his ill-advised foray into color commentary of women’s college basketball. “Not to dance on anyone’s grave,” says Scarborough, “but the second I heard about Imus, I told my wife, ‘Honey, it’s gonna be a busy weekend.’ ” For the previous four years, he had been unmemorably hosting Scarborough Country, an evening show on MSNBC in which he came off as a B-team O’Reilly impersonator. But he’d always been convinced the format was the problem. “All of my executive producers had always told me the same thing: ‘We’ve got to get you off the prompter more—you’re best when you’re just talking off the top of your head,’ ” he says. Imus’s morning slot seemed like the perfect opportunity.

Unfortunately, no one else thought of Scarborough as the kind of guy people would want to wake up to. “I didn’t see it at all,” admits Chris Licht, Scarborough’s longtime producer. “He was so enthusiastic, I thought, Okay, I’ll pretend to go along with him. But it was really just me hoping he’d change his mind in a couple of days.”

(Continued here.)