He was the sort of guy who asked all the annoying questions in Sunday school-not because he didn’t believe in the dogmas, but because he believed that if you’re going to commit to the Mother Church and all that it entails, don’t be a hypocrite about it. I think my exposure to parish Catholicism, my respect for institutions, and my contempt for the men who ruined them appealed to Wayne. He’d considered the priesthood I’d considered a career in the Navy, though a few years in uniform cured me of it. He’d gone to a Catholic college in Philly, the same as much of my family before me. As we got to know each other, some key deeper affinities emerged. To his evident surprise, I still came back for work the next day. Wayne took a shine to me after he dressed me down, publicly and floridly, for showing up late on the first day of my internship under him at the Village Voice.
It was important, he thought, for media consumers to know when they were being manipulated, and how. “Many viewers block out-or simply don’t know much about-a résumé” as partisan (and amoral, and devoid of achievement) as Scarborough’s, Wayne wrote. Still, much of it resonates with me today: a paean to an expert phony whose studied simulation of charisma makes him a darling of politics and media, not in spite of his many hypocrisies, but because of them. Eventually, Scarborough did answer the goddamn questions, and Wayne produced a dense, far-ranging cover story that landed with a thud in 2008. I looked back with my best Believe It, Shut The Fuck Up And Answer The Goddamn Questions look. But something about Scarborough’s look pissed me off he’d let the aw-shucks, guitar-playing, faintly jockish polite-guy mask slip ever so slightly to reveal a look that I recognized, in the semaphoric body language of the unconsoled, three-sheets-to-the-wind bro, as Middle-Aged White Man Can’t Believe This Is Happening To Him. Somehow, Wayne had made him materialize in a restaurant and answer questions. I was a young journalist in the making, and Scarborough was a guy I’d read about for years, and often seen on TV. Up to that point, I’d still been vaguely starstruck. This fucking guy, the look seemed to say. And then, in hour five (or six), forced to revisit his past life as a cop-car-chasing demagogue, he melted in his seat across from me, his eyes glazing under a ballcap-maybe Alabama or the Yankees, both seem plausible now-and he shot me a look of tired exasperation, like I would understand his pain. In hour four, his long frame drooped over the table. In hour three, he called somebody to check on his kids. Scarborough agreed to sit for the dinner interview, probably expecting it to last an hour or two. And so he’d had me and my colleagues flush out every school classmate and every Pensacola attorney who’d ever known Scarborough until the fratty television statue picked up a phone, called Wayne, and asked him why the fuck the reporter’s interns were talking to everyone in his life. It wasn’t that Clinton wasn’t worthy of criticism rather, that Wayne knew Scarborough was a media-milking skink with an agenda. For reasons not fully clear to me until his many-thousand-word story came out, Wayne had decided that Scarborough’s liberal renaissance was worth a fisking in the middle of this heated primary season. His entire shtick then consisted of praising Democratic primary dark-horse Barack Obama and bagging on the right’s time-tested nemesis, Hillary Clinton. This was back in early 2008, and Scarborough, the budget-obsessed attack dog of the Newt Congress, was a rising star at liberal MSNBC. Wayne was leaning into Scarborough, repeating questions from the first hour, about how Joe had given legal advice to a man accused of murdering an abortion doctor in North Florida prior to Scarborough’s heady ascent to Congress during the Republican Revolution of 1994. It was hour five or six of our marathon interview with Joe Scarborough at some Midtown white-tablecloth joint that was anxious to get us the hell out. I can pinpoint the moment when I realized I loved Wayne Barrett, a man who regularly screamed at me and my fellow interns with the enthusiasm of a charismatic minister and a profane vocabulary favored by longshoremen.
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