Michael Smerconish Still, Somehow, Refuses to Take Sides

Q&A

He was a Reagan/Bush guy all the way. Pals with Rizzo. But by the mid-aughts, Main Line journalist Michael Smerconish found himself throwing all his weight behind Barack Obama. In a nation where you’re now forced to pick a side or be labeled a traitor, Smerconish picks none.

Hi, Michael.
Exactly on time. I like it.

I’m actually 45 seconds early. I never want to be late for anything.
Listen. If you’re not early, you’re late. That’s my mantra.

Congrats on 10 years at CNN. Where does the time go?
That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, given that milestone and also just over 10 years on SiriusXM. Holy shit. It feels like yesterday. And you’ve been at Philly Mag for quite a while!

I enjoy the freedom I have here.
You just articulated the best thing about my work. They let me do my own thing. You can give me credit for a segment if you like it. And you can blame me if you don’t. I do my CNN show remotely, so I’m not in the office and exposed to the groupthink of the network.

You, of course, have your three-hour morning show on satellite radio Monday through Friday, and then you’re live on CNN Saturday morning. What the hell do you do on Sunday?
[Laughs] Saturday night is the only night I don’t set an alarm for the next morning. Of course, I’m still up no later than 6 a.m. on Sunday. I can’t help it.

So your only night to have any fun is really on Saturday.
That’s true, but my wife and I don’t lead a very active social life. She works seven days a week.

Is this limited social life a product of the pandemic, or has it been that way for some time?
I do so much talking during the course of a day, so to not have to be “on” is a treat. I remember when our kids were young, I was always expected to be the life of the party at back-to-school nights and other school functions, because I speak for a living. But the thing is, I’m just not the life of the party.

I was never much of a talk-radio listener, so I think my first exposure to you was actually through the opinion columns you wrote for the Daily News. And I enjoyed the fact that I never knew quite where you were going to land on a given topic. At times, you could be quite conservative. But on some issues, not at all.
I actually wrote for the Inquirer, too. Fifteen years. Something like 1,072 columns. I published a book looking back on 100 of them, and I had to take ownership for some I wish I hadn’t written.

I recall you getting some flak for defending a controversial Daily News cover.
The Daily News published a cover that showed individuals on the lam who were wanted for murder. It turned out that at that time, there was no one wanted for murder whose face was white. The cover didn’t go over so well. The Daily News was embarrassed and apologized for it. But I thought the cover was entirely appropriate and said so.

Would you still feel that way today? A lot has happened since then, and some media outlets, including the Inquirer and Daily News, have changed the way they cover crime.
I just think you need to do things consistently. Let’s apply the rules across every demographic. The way I see it, now we have rules for some people that we don’t apply to others.

I haven’t left the Republican Party. They left me. It just doesn’t look like the party I grew up with.”

Why did you make the switch from terrestrial radio to satellite?
My goal with the local radio show was to get into syndication, which is what happened, and I was eventually on more than 100 stations across the country. But I did not have a good relationship with the syndicator, and there were some issues with some of the things that I said, particularly for the conservative radio stations we were on in the country. It wound up being a bad partnership. SiriusXM told me they would let me do my thing.

Prior to your radio career, you worked for an incredibly polarizing figure: Frank Rizzo. What did you do for him?
I was in my third year of law school at Penn, and Rizzo hired me to be the political director in his 1987 rematch against Wilson Goode. I had just run the Philadelphia portion of Arlen Specter’s 1986 reelection campaign. Rizzo became a Republican in ’87 to run against Goode, and he brought me in because he needed people who knew the Republican lay of the land. What it really meant was that I was, for 365 straight days, one of four people in a car with Frank, crisscrossing the city for campaign events. Those car rides are something I should have written a book about. Incredible stories.

Michael Smerconish (center) with Frank Rizzo in 1987 / Photograph courtesy of Michael Smerconish

What are your impressions of Rizzo as a person?
They broke the mold, to quote the old expression. There was no one like him. We had a very close relationship at the time. He was street-smart, loyal, funny. And I believe he was well-intended, even when he made mistakes. He had the city’s best interests at heart. Was he perfect? No.

Should there still be a statue of him across from City Hall?
Yes.

A lot of people these days would find it hard to believe that Rizzo was a Democrat for most of his career. You, in fact, started out as a Republican. Was that just because your parents were Republicans?
Like most of us back then, I registered, without much thought, for the party of my parents. I came of age in the Reagan ’80s, and if the Republican Party today were like the Republican Party of Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush, I would still be a Republican. I haven’t left the Republican Party. They left me. It just doesn’t look like the party I grew up with. Now, let me be clear: I am not a Democrat. I’m an independent.

Michael Smerconish with Arlen Specter in 1986 / Photograph courtesy of Michael Smerconish

You really were a Reagan/Bush guy. You founded the Youth for Reagan/Bush at Lehigh University. Do you reflect positively on their legacies?
Yes. Both of them. I have no regrets.

Many LGBTQ people would take issue with your stance, pointing out Reagan’s failure to respond to the AIDS crisis.
That was sad and a mistake. Listen, I can’t defend his record with what we now call LGBTQ people relative to the way we see the world today. If Reagan were alive today, he would see the world differently. I am not holding him accountable for his 1982 perspective, just as I hope nobody holds me accountable for some of my ways of thinking in 1982. Really, I hope we’ve all evolved.

I know a fair number of more moderate Republicans who left the party when Trump became a reality. But you left earlier, didn’t you?
In the year 2000, when it was George W. Bush/Gore, I was still very much on the train. Four years later, when the final PA rally for Bush was in a Bucks County cornfield in front of 20,000 people, I was the master of ceremonies. But I became disenchanted — not for the issues we think of today; not because of extremism. I came to believe that he was no longer looking for Osama bin Laden. He made a big mistake diverting into Iraq. And I was carrying the torch for more than 3,000 people who died on September 11th. We needed to kill those responsible.

I came to interview Barack Obama a dozen times, including when he was president — I did the first interview with him from the White House — and if you go back to listen to my early tapes with him, as I have done, you will hear this junior Senator from Illinois telling me he would find and kill Osama bin Laden even if he had to do so in Pakistan. And that’s how the story ended. I voted for Obama and am happy I did so.

Smerconish interviewing Barack Obama in 2012 / Official White House photo by Pete Souza, courtesy of Michael Smerconish

Getting back to this idea of falling to the left on some issues and falling to the right on others, I feel like it’s much harder to do that today. Both “sides” seem to have a “You’re either with us or against us” mandate and are perfectly happy to burn it all down. There’s no compromise. There’s no middle ground.
I think that is an accurate description, but that’s what is killing us. I’m on a mission through my shows to prove that you can build an audience without being polarizing, while also being civil. The fact is, there is still far more that we have in common than what divides us, but you tune into most cable news shows and you wouldn’t know that, because it’s all about eyes and ears and mouse clicks. And oh my, how easy it would be for me to prepare for tomorrow’s radio show and Saturday on CNN if I just toed the party line. I wouldn’t have to do a fucking thing. I could just read talking points.

Michael Smerconish with John McCain in 2006 / Photograph courtesy of Michael Smerconish

In terms of your CNN show, I can only imagine the prep that goes into it. How often do you find yourself scrambling at the last minute to try to keep up with the news of the day?
I can’t tell you how many times in the age of Trump we had to tear up what we had on Friday and start new for Saturday. When I began at CNN, we were taping my show on Friday night and airing it at 9 a.m. on Saturday, and even re-airing it at 6 p.m. But now, the news cycle is shifting constantly, and it’s just impossible to do that. So now I deliver the show live.

I was pleased when CNN named you the temporary replacement for Chris Cuomo after his 2021 scandal. I thought you’d get the permanent job. But that didn’t happen.
[Laughs] There’s definitely a pattern of me being the sixth man on the court. It’s remarkable how many times I invested sweat equity into gigs that never panned out. During the same five-year period in the 2000s, I was the principal fill-in for Chris Matthews on Hardball and Bill O’Reilly on his radio show. There were even times when I would do my own radio show and both of those shows in the same day. But when O’Reilly quit radio, they told me, “Hey, you do a great job, but we need a ‘name.’” And they got Fred Thompson. With Hardball, it was, “Hey, you do a great job, but we are young and liberal and nerdy, and you are none of the above.”

In 2008, MSNBC did the Race for the White House show, which was solely focused on the campaign. The host was David Gregory, and the panelists were yours truly, Rachel Maddow, and Time magazine’s Washington bureau chief, Jay Carney. Well, Gregory gets Meet the Press, Maddow gets a nightly show of her own, Carney becomes the press secretary for Biden and then Obama, and I’m still not in prime time. Before CNN, I was at MSNBC. Joe Scarborough was the 10 p.m. host on MSNBC, and I became his principal fill-in. Don Imus had his radio show in the morning with an MSNBC simulcast, and when Imus was fired for making a racist statement, who got the emergency call? I was in the chair on Monday. And then they gave that job to Scarborough, and his 10 p.m. gig didn’t come my way, either.

Michael Smerconish on Election Night 2016 with Nia-Malika Henderson, David Axelrod, Gloria Borger, and Anderson Cooper / Photograph courtesy of Michael Smerconish

Almost comical.
I’ve delivered a number of commencement speeches, and for the one I gave at Temple’s school of media, my whole speech was to walk through in detail all the things I worked hard for and didn’t achieve. I thought it was more valuable for them to hear about the failures and the reality of the business.

So will you ever have your own prime-time show?
Hmmm. I am not currently looking to do anything different. I am happy with both radio and television. And I have a pair of podcasts. Plus, I do a daily YouTube. And I have a daily newsletter. I also do paid public speaking all over the country.

What do you speak on?
Currently,­ I do a presentation I call the Mingle Project. It’s all about the need for common experiences. The world connected by the internet has made us disconnected from one another and has fueled polarization and affected our mental health, especially on the part of our youth.

Due to the nature of my job, I’m so hyper-focused on local news that I find myself unable to follow national and international news as much as I’d like to. Is the reverse true for you?
Something had to give for me, and sadly, that has been local news. If you were to ask me about Cherelle Parker, I wouldn’t be able to say much other than that I wish Allan Domb had won the election. I wish I could pay more attention to local news, but I certainly won’t be able to until after November.

Perhaps I can sell you a Philly Mag subscription.
[Laughs] I’ve had a Philly Mag subscription for many years. I think it’s still the glue that holds together the community, and I really fear the death of local newspapers and magazines. We need to be reminded of our commonalities, and I think you guys do that very well.

Democracy is in peril if Trump is elected. But I’m not gonna say that it’s an entirely rosy picture if Biden is reelected.”

Who will you vote for on November 5th?
Um. I don’t know, because I don’t know what the field is going to be. I’ve been eager to see what comes of the No Labels movement, but I’m increasingly pessimistic. There’s a market but not a candidate. They are struggling to find a ticket that is credible. But I’d love to see the moon and stars line up for something other than Republican or Democrat.

If it comes down to Biden or Trump?
I think they are both flawed.

Biden fans say democracy is in peril if Trump wins. Trump fans say the country will collapse if it’s Biden. What’s your perspective?
Democracy is in peril if Trump is elected. But I’m not gonna say that it’s an entirely rosy picture if Biden is reelected.

Michael Smerconish with Donald Trump in 2017 / Photograph courtesy of Michael Smerconish

Okay, getting off the subject of the coming American apocalypse, you graduated from Penn Law. Penn’s name has been dragged through the gutter in the last several months, and Penn president Liz Magill was ousted. Should she have been?
No. Liz Magill was tone-deaf during her Congressional testimony. She should have slammed her fists on the table and condemned Hamas. She and the other two school presidents that testified, they are all eggheads. They did not have street smarts. But the pendulum has swung so far that good people are afraid to express their opinions.

You ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature while you were in law school. Any thoughts of running for public office again?
I’ve certainly thought about it. I looked at the U.S. Senate race in the last cycle. I thought John Fetterman and Dr. Oz were both deficient.

Finally, I know you and your wife, Lavinia, have lived in Villanova for many years. Are you one of those suburbanites who are afraid to come into the city?
No. I lived for a decade in Center City and still feel very connected to it. I am concerned by what I see, but I still love the city. We do the CNN show from a studio in the city. I do business in the city. And I definitely eat in the city!

Where do the Smerconishes enjoy eating?
Just pull up Stephen Starr’s website and pick one. If it’s my birthday, Dandelion. We also love Parc. Otherwise, it’s takeout from Villa di Roma. Or a pizza from Marrone’s in Ardmore. I can’t get enough of that pizza. Basically, just give me anything with red sauce on it and I’m good.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Published as “Big Talker” in the May 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.