Who is Glenn Beck?

Here are a few highlights from a NYT Magazine article on Glenn Beck, who is someone, I'll admit, I don't understand:

--He's not all that interested in the Tea Party movement.

"He showed little interest in the results from primary elections held the day before — upsets in Delaware and New York for Tea Party candidates whose followers often invoke Beck and Palin as spiritual leaders and even promote them as a prospective presidential ticket in 2012.

“Not involved with the Tea Party,” Beck told me, shrugging. While many identify Beck with a political insurgency — as Rush Limbaugh was identified with the Republican sweep of 1994 — to believe that the nation suffers from “a political problem” comically understates things, in his view."

--Beck doesn't speak with an ideological certainty, a la Hannity or O'Reilly.

"Beck rarely speaks with the squinty-eyed certainty or smugness of Rush Limbaugh or his fellow Fox News hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. He often changes his mind or nakedly contradicts himself." He's more approachable, personable, even feminine about Beck. "Fans approach Beck and give him hugs. Do people feel they can hug Limbaugh? There is something feminine about Beck — the soft features, the crying on the air, the reflexive vulnerability. It sets him apart from the standard, testosterone-addled rant artists of cable and talk radio. Women tune into Beck’s radio show more heavily than they do to other conservative commentators....Beck’s staff and loyalists love to compare Beck with Oprah Winfrey."

--His willingness to admit his mistakes may be somewhat self-serving, rather than truly humble.

"Beck is constantly admitting his weaknesses and failures, which he wields as both a crutch and a shield. 'Maybe Glenn’s transparency is what keeps him out of trouble,' says Robert Beath, Beck’s drama teacher at Sehome High School in Bellingham, Wash. Beath, who was fond of Beck as a teenager, said Beck appears to now think that his revelations grant him license. 'When he says, ‘I am not perfect,’ he seems to escape accountability for his various points of view. Yet he expects others to be accountable for their point of view without seeming to allow them the ‘I am not perfect’ exception.”

--Beck is exceptionally polarizing.

“He has a spiritual connection to us; you can hear his heart speaking,” Susan Trevethan, a psychiatric nurse from Milford, Conn., told me at the “Restoring Honor” rally. “I believe he has been divinely guided to be here in this place,” she said. “He is doing the research. He is teaching us.”

Or if you prefer: “Even the leather-winged shouting heads at Fox News look like intellectual giants next to this bleating, benighted Cassandra,” wrote The Buffalo Beast, in naming Beck one of the 50 most loathsome people in America in 2006. (No. 24 then, but in January he made it to No. 1.) “It’s like someone found a manic, doom-prophesying hobo in a sandwich board, shaved him, shot him full of Zoloft and gave him a show.”

--Beck was (and perhaps still is) a very sick person. “

I said to someone the other day,” Beck told me, “I am as close today to a complete and total collapse as I was on the first day of recovery.” He calls himself a “recovering dirtbag.” There were many days, he said, when he would avoid the bathroom mirror so he would not have to face himself. He was in therapy with “Dr. Jack Daniels.” He smoked marijuana every day for about 15 years. He fired an underling for bringing him the wrong pen. And, according to a Salon.com report, he once called the wife of a radio rival to ridicule her — on the air — about her recent miscarriage.

“You get to a place where you disgust yourself,” Beck told me. “Where you realize what a weak, pathetic and despicable person you have become.”

--Beck became a Mormon with his second wife.

Beck met Tania in 1998. She walked into the New Haven radio station where he was working to pick up a Sony Walkman she won in a contest. They began dating. He wanted to marry, and she agreed, but only on the condition that they find a religion together. They shopped around, attended services and eventually settled on Mormonism — inspired in part by Beck’s best friend and radio sidekick, Pat Gray, who himself is Mormon. Beck, who was brought up Roman Catholic, has called his faith “the most important thing” in his life.

--Beck as America's 'history professor':

Beck fashions himself a kind of self-teaching populist for the Internet age. His characteristic chalkboard lends his show an air of retro-professorial authority, despite the fact that Beck did not attend college and says that before Sept. 11, 2001, “I didn’t know my butt from my elbow.” He recommends books. He recently started “Glenn Beck University,” a special collection of “classes” on GlennBeck.com to go with Beck’s daily tutorials. Pat Gray said Beck was “America’s history professor.”

“Beck offers a story about the American past for people who are feeling right now very angry and alienated,” says David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and editor of the conservative Web site Frum Forum. “It is different enough from the usual story in that he makes them feel like they’ve got access to secret knowledge.”

--Beck's show has an apocalyptic feel to it.

The ethos of Beck’s program is extreme doom and pessimism. In a lead-in to Beck’s show, Shepard Smith referred to his fellow host’s studio as “the Fear Chamber.” This is another departure from the Limbaugh formula. “Rush is basically of a quite optimistic creed,” Frum says. “It’s the Reagan creed: America’s best days are still to come. If we maintain the free-enterprise system, we’re all going to be richer and more united and stronger. With Beck, there is no optimism.”

On Fox News in early September, Beck stood in a mock doorway painted gold. When the country’s economic system reaches “the point of insanity,” he said, it is wise to invest in gold. “Gold prices are climbing,” Beck said, a point buttressed throughout the hour by advertisements from gold dealers. On the other side of the golden doorway is where things get really scary, he said. Who knows what dark, apocalyptic things are there? “Is it bullets?” Beck wondered. “Is it whiskey? Is it cigarettes?”

Beck often speaks of — and is teased about — his “bunker,” where he will retreat after the social fabric rends and the economic system collapses. Some of his most devoted advertisers include companies that could thrive in a period of total collapse — makers of emergency power generators, for instance, or “survival seeds” (allowing citizens to grow their own food).

I asked Beck if he actually had a bunker. No, he said, there is no bunker. He does keep a great deal of food in reserve, although he says that predates his fear that the world would melt down. Food storage is a tenet of his Mormon faith, he said. It is for when tough times come.

--Beck's relationship with other Fox personnel is less than fabulous.

When I mentioned Beck’s name to several Fox reporters, personalities and staff members, it reliably elicited either a sigh or an eye roll. Several Fox News journalists have complained that Beck’s antics are embarrassing Fox, that his inflammatory rhetoric makes it difficult for the network to present itself as a legitimate news outlet. Fearful that Beck was becoming the perceived face of Fox News, some network insiders leaked their dissatisfaction in March to The Washington Post’s media critic, Howard Kurtz, a highly unusual breach at a place where complaints of internal strains rarely go public.

While Beck’s personal ventures and exposure have soared this year, his television ratings have declined sharply — perhaps another factor in the network’s impatience. His show now averages two million viewers, down from a high of 2.8 million in 2009, according to the Nielsen Ratings. And as of Sept. 21, 296 advertisers have asked that their commercials not be shown on Beck’s show (up from 26 in August 2009). Fox also has a difficult time selling ads on “The O’Reilly Factor” and “Fox and Friends” when Beck appears on those shows as a guest. Beck’s show is known in the TV sales world as “empty calories,” meaning he draws great ratings but is toxic for ad sales. If nothing else, I sensed that people around Fox News have grown weary after months of “It’s all about Glenn.”

--Beck is clearly a work in progress.

NO ONE SEEMS to quite know what to make of Beck these days. On “Fox News Sunday” the day after the “Restoring Honor” gathering, Chris Wallace asked him, “What are you?”

Beck appears conflicted over whether he wants to be the face of Honor Restored or the voice of a Great American Freakout or whether some fusion of the two is possible. He told me that he has enjoyed himself more since Aug. 28, an event that included no references to contemporary politics. It is not clear if this new tenor is a trend or phase or whether Beck is in the midst of a fundamental transformation. “I’m a work in progress, man,” he told me. “I don’t know how to make this transition.” It has become a nagging preoccupation. “I wrote Sarah Palin a letter last night about 2 in the morning,” Beck said on his radio show in September. “And I said: ‘Sarah, I don’t know if I’m doing more harm or more good. I don’t know anymore.’ ”