Conservative with common touch

'I'm a regular person," Laura Ingraham declares. And, chatting by cell phone on an Amtrak train, that is exactly how she comes off - smart and articulate, yes, but also unaffected and remarkably down-to-earth. In fact, talking with Ingraham is a lot like talking over the counter with a waitress at the local diner.

Of course, your neighborhood hash slinger probably doesn't have a resume like Ingraham's, one that includes Dartmouth grad, speechwriter in the Reagan administration, Supreme Court law clerk and frequent commentator for Fox News and other TV outlets.

But the lady comes by her Everywoman status honestly.

"My father worked two jobs," she says of growing up in Glastonbury, Conn. "My mother worked at a steak house in town. We didn't have much." That background probably helps account for why she connects with her audience.

Ingraham, 43, the conservative host of talk radio's The Laura Ingraham Show - heard on 325 stations nationwide, including WNTP-AM (990), and boasting a weekly audience of six million - is touring to promote her new book, Power to the People (Regnery, $27.95).

The book, she says, "is my sense of things" - which, briefly put, is that academic, financial, political and cultural elites exert a nefarious influence on American society and that there's plenty each of us can do to counter that influence.

Typical is Chapter 6, titled "Saving Our Pornified Culture" and featuring sections labeled "The 'Just Turn It Off' Defense Debunked" and "Sex, Sex Everywhere."

Ingraham's manner of discourse is provocative, and a lot of what she says is designed to irritate those on the left end of the political spectrum. There's this, for example: "Liberals use public schools to grind their ideological axes. Nobody should say public schools don't teach values - it's just that the values they teach are a disdain for America, a dislike of capitalism, and an embrace of the Hollywood approach to morality."

But Ingraham is no Ann Coulter. She needles. She doesn't slash and burn. To observe that just as "businessmen want their companies to be as big as possible," so "Ted Kennedy wants his tumbler to be as big as possible" isn't all that far from a Jay Leno quip.

Actually, what Ingraham says regarding government action to combat pornography - that "this is one area where conservatives and moderate Democrats should be able to find common ground" - is also true of several other topics she discusses.

She's often knocked in the media as another reactionary hatchetwoman with a pretty face. Publishers Weekly termed her previous book, 2003's Shut Up & Sing: How Elites From Hollywood, Politics, and the U.N. are Subverting America, a "vociferous but ill-supported right-wing screed."

But there seems to be a softer tone to Power to the People. Liberals and conservatives alike, for instance, might want states to "get out of the textbook selection process and let the individual teachers pick the materials that fit best for them." The same holds true for this admonition: "You want to make your town, city, and country better? You want the place cleaned up? Get involved, and do it! Run for office."

Moreover, Ingraham may be conservative, but she is by no means uncritical of the Bush administration. She opposed the recently defeated immigration reform legislation - supported not only by the president but also by the eminently conservative Wall Street Journal - big time. She has nothing against immigrants, pointing out that her mother was from Poland, but she calls the argument that "we can't deport 12 million people" - identified in the book as a favorite of the president's - a "big lie."

She thinks that if current laws were strictly enforced most illegal aliens would head back to their country of origin. When it is suggested that, no, if current laws were strictly enforced, millions of illegal aliens without any income would have be deported, imprisoned or normalized in some way, she stands her ground: "People are coming here because they know they can, and because they know they will be shielded in a workplace that does not abide by the existing regulatory framework. When those jobs dry up, I don't believe the people from Guatemala and Mexico are going to sit on the streets and panhandle. Most of them will go home. I think self-deportation is a reality."

Ingraham was also opposed to the nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. "I led the fight against her nomination," she says proudly. "I was the first one in the national media to say - an hour after the president nominated her - 'This is a disaster.' "

Given how much of her book is devoted to deploring the influence of "elites," it may seem - as conservative commentator Fred Barnes suggested - more than a little elitist to argue that only legal scholars should be named to the court. After all, the Constitution gives the president the right to nominate anyone he wants, and might not the perspective of someone outside the legal profession be useful? Ingraham, who has a doctor of laws degree from the University of Virginia and clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, vehemently disagrees.

"Since when is it elitist to believe that people should be qualified for a job?" she asks. "When you play in [what amounts to] the NFL of the law you better have trained and have the talent." Miers, she thinks, had neither the training nor the talent: "When you reviewed the few things that she did write, it was just a mishmash of poorly thought-out banalities and bromides."

"I didn't know what school [Miers] went to, nor did I care," Ingraham says. "What I cared about was her experience in battling it out in the world of judicial ideas. I saw up close, clerking in the Supreme Court, what is required of a justice. . . . You go in there, you know your stuff or you get rolled."

Power to the People is obviously a polemic, aimed at one political camp and disdainful of another. But there is an undercurrent running though it that seems almost at odds with its rhetoric and that certainly tempers its tone. This is especially so in the final chapter, which is the book's best, if only because it is the most personal and heartfelt. In it she recounts both her mother's death from lung cancer and her own battle with breast cancer.

"The overarching theme of the book," she says, "is the need to reinvigorate the notion of sacrificial concern in all of us. . . . When the roles are reversed, and you become the person caring for the sick parent, it brings the notion of sacrifice to your core. That was the beginning of my asking myself, 'What do I really want to do in this life?' "

Ingraham converted to Catholicism in 2003. Two years later she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

"Lots of things have become substitutes for faith," she says, "narcissism, materialism, science worship, plastic surgery - it's all a way to augment ourselves, beef up our bank accounts, fill up our houses with stuff we don't need and by the end of it we're just as hungry as we were before."

"I used to think I could do it all," she adds, warming to the subject. "I can work, I can have a great social life, I can be on all these TV shows . . . but at the end of the day you realize that none of that matters. . . . All these debates about immigration and the courts, they're interesting, but in the end, we're all going to be here for a really short time. That time is slipping away, and I want to make it matter."

Laura Ingraham opens up to Inquirer books editor Frank Wilson about her faith, her mother, and the direction of her life. Listen to the podcast at http://go.philly.com/ lauraingraham.

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