CHANGEOVER Michael Medved today talk radio’s most convincing conservative spent most of his twenties involved in political campaigns on behalf of left-wing candidates. Ironically the experience helped drive him in the opposite direction politically but change took time. “I refused to give up on thinking of myself as a liberal because I didn’t want to stop seeing myself as a good person” (Photos: Luci Varon)

"Thanks for sparing me the need to write my autobiography" I quip to national talk-radio host Michael Medved when we first meet at the Bonneville Radio Building in downtown Seattle on a drizzly day in late February.

I’ve been reading his autobiography Right Turns and find the parallels to my own life eerie. We both come from highly identified Jewish families of all boys all but one of whom became observant Jews. We both have followed a trajectory from left to right both religiously and politically. We even shared a favorite breed of dog: I grew up with two Norwegian Elkhounds and Michael’s first marital home also included two of the same breed.

Michael was voted “most radical” in his elite high school class; I (regrettably) got the dress code abolished in my suburban high school. Medved went on to become one of the leaders of the Vietnam Moratorium Day and to address 50 000 protestors on New Haven Green.

We started Yale Law School just a few years apart though his class included many more illustrious names including Bill and Hillary Clinton. He still remembers Hillary as “the warmest and most welcoming” of his classmates though he debunks the myth that she stood out as one of the most “brilliant minds” in the class. It was Hillary who gave him the necessary encouragement to drop out after his freshman year in law school to become the chief speechwriter for Senate candidate Joseph Duffey in the face of fierce maternal opposition.

John Kerry and George W. Bush were a few years ahead of him at Yale College which he entered at 16. He would not get to know the future president until decades later but Kerry was chairman of his party the Liberals in the Yale Political Union. Kerry wore cufflinks inscribed with the monogram “JFK ” and jabbed the air with his left hand when he spoke in imitation of the slain president. He even carefully coiffed his hair in the manner of the Kennedy brothers. Everyone knew that one day he would run for president.

Shortly after an audience with Kerry in which the future senator and secretary of state droned on about how his young followers in the Political Union could aspire to his eminence one day Michael and a fellow party whip ran through the quadrangle of their residential college one night shouting “We can’t turn out like John Kerry ” and dropped out of the Yale Political Union.

Studio Time

It will be almost four hours before I can really begin my interview with Medved who is also the author of 13 books and a columnist for USA Today. He is on air in only half an hour and is fully occupied reviewing the newspapers and news briefings he started reading at 5 a.m. and cutting out op-eds or news items he might use. I try to remain silent and unobtrusive — not the strongest part of my skill set.

At five minutes before noon I’m ushered into the studio from which The Michael Medved Show is broadcast Monday through Friday at 12 noon PST. Broadcast on the network of the conservative Salem Radio Network it reaches four million discrete listeners a week making it one of the most listened-to talk radio shows in the country. Opposite Medved is Jeremy Steiner who keeps everything running on time inserts the sound bites for the various news items that will be discussed and selects the music that leads in and out of breaks. He has already spent much of the morning going over the schedule and the topics with Michael.