Major Garrett: Different Job, Same Smarts

Remember that guy who claims he left the position of Chief White House Correspondent at Fox News because he wanted to get back to his roots in print journalism? Well, he starts his new gig at the Weekly Reader today.

Major Garrett, whose new job is actually as the Congressional Correspondent for National Journal, revealed to Imus the real reason he departed the Fox. “Have you ever watched yourself on HD-TV?” he said. “I did once, and I said, I gotta get out.”

Initially motivated to do well in broadcast journalism by a CNN executive who told him he had no future in it, Garrett began to feel, after ten years, that he needed get back to a place where he was “thinking a lot more and talking a lot less.”

Despite his affiliation with Fox, Garrett was always considered a down-the-middle reporter, a trait he’ll continue to embody at National Journal. “I was, to the degree television allows you to be, a shoe leather reporter,” he said. “I really enjoy that.”

Working for National Journal, a company he said is “trying to reestablish the importance, the primacy, of solid, investigative, and political analysis and reporting” will allow Garrett to try to redirect what he called “the wave” of blogs.

“There’s not really any new information there,” he said of the blogosphere. “They’re just being pushed along by people in politics pushing information.”

He insisted that covering Congress has never been more relevant, as last week’s primaries proved. With the conventional wisdom pointing to a Republican takeover in the House, Garrett is focused on what the GOP will do differently than it did in 1994, when it last took over Congress.

“I’m going to explain what those things are, what lessons they think they’ve learned, and what lessons they’ll try to apply if, in fact, they take control,” he said.

While the potential exists that the Republicans will take over the Senate along with the House, Garrett believes it’s a long shot, especially in light of Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell’s primary victory over Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware.

Christine O'Donnell“Senate seats are hard to win, and you need a massive sea change,” he said. “When Republicans won 54 seats in the House in 1994 to take control of that chamber for the first time in 40 years, they picked up eight Senate seats. You’d need two more than that huge wave, unforeseen and not before seen in almost six decades of American politics.”

As for O’Donnell, her chances of winning dipped even lower after Bill Maher revealed on his show last week that she once dabbled in witchcraft, and even dated a witch, a fact that jumped out at the I-Man for its homosexual implications.

“Witches are women,” Imus pointed out. He paused. “At least the ones I’ve known.”

-Julie Kanfer