Jeff Greenfield and Imus Come to Strange Conclusion About Sarah Palin and...Oprah?

After waiting a few minutes longer than usual for Imus to get to him, Jeff Greenfield’s voice stank of sarcasm as he said, “I would not have missed a conversation about all those country stars’ lives for anything, so it was fine.”
 
Imus claimed his feelings were hurt, but Greenfield, a senior political correspondent for CBS News, deemed that impossible. “You are the audio version of Oprah’s new network—nothing but good feelings,” Greenfield said, referring to OWN, the Winfrey-run network that debuted just a few days ago on most cable carriers.
 
“It’s, in a way, unprecedented that an entire network is built around the appeal of one person,” Greenfield said. “Although she’s hardly your ordinary figure.”
 
Though he has no idea why, Imus likes Oprah. Ditto Greenfield, who said he would take “under prayerful consideration” whether Barbara Walters was wrong to ask Oprah the lesbian question in a recent interview.
 
Moving on, Greenfield praised Imus for showing a clip of Fox News Anchor Shep Smith joining the left-leaning Jon Stewart in bashing Congress for not passing the health care bill for 9/11 first responders. Though Smith is “a straight arrow newscaster,” as Greenfield put it, those watching his network tend to the Right, as those watching Stewart on Comedy Central tend to the Left.
 
“When you have people at both sides coming at that issue, and basically saying, ‘Shame to the people who voted against it,’ I think those twin factors played a role in getting that bill through,” Greenfield said.
 
He acknowledged that many Democrats watch Fox News, though the majority of viewers tend to be Republican, and noted that the opposite would be true for a network like MSNBC. “I talked once to a Democratic senator who told me the television set is always on MSNBC at home,” Greenfield said. “And I said, ‘Why, after 12 hours of debate in the Senate, do you go home and watch more politics?’ And the answer was, ‘It’s like soaking in a nice, warm bath.’”
 
Imus wondered how much worse of better off the country might be if Sarah Palin were President instead of Obama, and Greenfield didn’t really reply, instead pointing out that no matter what one thinks of her, Palin’s no dummy.
 
“Here’s somebody who’s turned the governorship of Alaska and an unsuccessful bid for Vice President into a multimillion-dollar empire, where she gets to talk only to people who like her for $100,000 or more a pop; is a favorite on the most-watched cable news network in the country; and makes millions of dollars selling books,” Greenfield said. “This is how dumb she is.”
 
He encouraged Imus to ask that same question of someone who more ideologically inclined to support Palin. “Either a majority, or close to it, of Republicans don’t think she’s qualified to be President,” he said. “So what she has is an enormous, intensely loyal base of people who like her, and think any criticism of her is just an example of left-wing media bias.”
 
Which kind of makes Palin a bit like Oprah, in Imus’s view. “We all like her, but we just don’t want her to run anything.”
 
-Julie Kanfer