Rarely are you surprised by people in politics in a positive way.
Usually people end up disappointing you – like Adam Kinzinger.
Tucker Carlson is one of those rare examples of a positive surprise.
Like many of you, I remember the permanently bow-tied Little Lord Fauntleroy figure from CNN’s Crossfire, who seemed to blither the weakest, most nuanced opinions at the drop of a top hat.
There was something about him deeply off-putting, like an uncanny valley video game rendering of a political pundit.
He did one thing that people in politics do when they’re not well-liked – he hung around long enough to have a redemption arc.
For most of the right, that ball got rolling when he was brought on board at Fox News in 2009 on the “Fox and Friends” team. This previously-borderline-intolerable CNN talking head meshed well with the daytime chat broadcast, and he gained fans with his witty banter on Fox’s tremendous late night inmates-running-the-asylum broadcast, Red Eye. In 2010, he co-founded The Daily Caller, a “conservative answer to the Huffington Post.”
In fact, Tucker explains why he dropped the notorious bowtie in an interview:
I don’t mind scorn and ridicule but I work in New York during the week so I have to walk through Penn Station and the number of people screaming the F word at me wore me down so I just gave in and became conventional.
See? Bullying works.
The newer, cooler Tucker Carlson took over the vaunted O’Reilly evening slot and became the leading voice in conservative pundit we know and love today.
In the post-Trump presidency, Tucker has been the go-to for conservative governors who need to explain themselves on the largest platform possible after chasing some extremely un-conservative policies:
In a recent Adam Carolla interview, Tucker went into detail about how he handles the pressure of his gig (he doesn’t read the comments or watch TV), trad family life (lives in a swanky pool house with his wife while his 4 kids occupy the main house, rides a bike) and Zen-like daily schedule (does sauna every day, has a set time to write and punch up his monologue for that evening’s broadcast).
The interview also included Tucker citing a gravely ill friend, mentioning this memorable, words-to-live-by quote:
“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
-D.H. Lawrence
You can catch a glimpse of Tucker as this really nice, normal dude when he was filmed by a clueless New Yorker fly fishing in Central Park:
The Right needs more leaders like this – family people, low-drama, holding others on the Right accountable, but doing so in a happy warrior, cheerful way.
To put it even more simply – to win the culture, the right needs more fly fishermen with brass balls.
