Morning Mika

Joe Scarborough’s co-host is not an agitated, abrasive in-your-face sparring partner. Rather, she’s a politically complicated, personally contented TV pro who’s finally found her groove on a daily TV rumble.

By Meredith Nelson

“Mika’s not a wacko Marxist,” Joe Scarborough says. “She just plays one on TV.” It’s the kind of over-the-top, polarizing comment that gives Morning Joe its energy. The friendly ribbing on MSNBC’s weekday-morning talk show often pits the conservative Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida, against ascendant sidekick Mika Brzezinski as a member of the much-derided “liberal mainstream media elite.”

Brzezinski takes it in stride. “If you tied me up and poked me with sticks and asked me questions on every ideological issue out there, I think you’d find that I’m conservative in ways that might surprise you,” she says.

Fresh off a Friday morning broadcast, Brzezinski is chatting while pulling off a sleek cashmere sweater and slipping into a T-shirt. Below the belt, she already is dressed down — jeans and daughter Emilie’s Uggs — one of the perks of being a newscaster who sits behind a desk. She and Scarborough work around the clock, so it’s strictly casual attire the minute they’re off camera.

As she takes off her TV makeup, she checks the time. She has one hour to go 16 blocks from her cluttered dressing room on the 17th floor of Manhattan’s storied 30 Rock skyscraper in Rockefeller Center to the WABC radio studios at Penn Plaza. No easy feat on a frigid day in January. Before she heads out, she grabs her cell phone for a quick chat with her nanny, with whom she “co-mothers” daughters Emilie, 13, and Carlie, 10. They make some last-minute arrangements for Carlie’s upcoming horse show.

“For the first time, I’m happy with all the pieces in my career and my life,” the 42-year-old says. “Up till now it’s been, ‘This will get me to this, and that will get me to the next step.’ Now I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing.”

The daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter from 1976 to 1980, Mika spent her tween years sleeping over at the White House with childhood friend Amy Carter. As a kid tooling around Camp David in a golf cart, she once drove smack into Menachem Begin’s shins.

good company Zbigniew Brzezinski, flanked by Menachem Begin (left) and President Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1978, raised Mika among powerful world leaders, even when her antics proved a bit painful for guests.

At 16 she accompanied her dad on a secret, well-armed meeting with Yasser Arafat in Tunisia. An inkblot of a rabbit her mom made for her during the Iran hostage crisis hangs on the wall in her dressing room and office. Young Mika named it Bunny Sadr, after Abolhassan Banisadr, a key figure in the anti-shah Iranian revolution who became president under Ayatollah Khomeini in 1980. It was a fitting start for a woman who now grills the likes of Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and Hillary Clinton. Oddly enough, Brzezinski, raised with two older brothers, never contemplated a political career, even in her formative years. She always wanted to be a journalist, she says.

“I would go with my dad when he was interviewed on the Today show, Nightline, and Meet the Press, and he thought I was listening to him. But I was totally wrapped up in what was going on around me.”

By the time she was 16, as a student at the prestigious Madeira School in McLean, Va., she got her first big break with The Mika and Melissa Show, which aired on a local cable channel. From that humble beginning, and straight through to today, “I truly see myself as a journalist first, always raising questions,” Brzezinski says.

One of Brzezinski’s earliest coups on Morning Joe was a strikingly prescient interview with Michelle Obama in November of ’07, when hope for a black president was virtually nil, particularly and most painfully among African-Americans.

In it, the future first lady told Brzezinski, “Black America will wake up and get it, but what we’re dealing with in the black community is just the natural fear of possibility.”

balancing act Mika has become an expert at juggling her career and making time for daughters Emilie, 13 (above, left), Carlie, 10.

The ethic of persistent questioning and perpetual movement that drives Mika becomes apparent in the WABC radio studio. Headphones firmly in place, she alternates spoonfuls of soup and sips of Starbucks tea, all while fiddling with her BlackBerry and reading a computer screen scrolling info on upcoming callers’ issues.

Despite the distractions, she keeps up a spirited discussion with Scarborough about President Obama’s intentions to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Scarborough stridently pooh-poohs reports of mistreatment, wondering aloud whether practices such as sleep deprivation and waterboarding can even be considered torture. “I want to know if waterboarding is torture. I want to know what torture is,” Brzezinski fires back. “I don’t want a bunch of cowboys out there deciding.” But her independent streak makes her just as likely to agree with Scarborough and to cross swords with him. By early February, she was on board with her co-host in slamming Obama’s $825 billion stimulus package.

“I feel as a taxpayer that we are getting completely hoodwinked all over again, just like with the bailout,” she said on the air.

“What we celebrate on our show is the exchange of ideas and being open to evolving on issues as we explore the details,” Brzezinski tells Newsmax.

Whatever they’re celebrating, it’s working. Morning Joe took over the three-hour MSNBC slot made vacant by the ouster of Don Imus’ morning show in the spring of 2007. It has since surpassed Imus’ ratings, delivering 384,000 total viewers per episode last year, up 27 percent from 2007, the strongest delivery ever for the network’s three-hour slot.

One turning point in the show’s popularity involved a celebrated incident in June 2007, when Brzezinski refused to read a story about Paris Hilton’s release from jail. She first threatened to burn it, then shredded it on the air. The incident generated tens of thousands of e-mails from fans who cheered Brzezinski for the move.

“It made me realize that we do what we want to do and have developed a format where we are not pressured to fall into the typical patterns of TV,” she recalls. Brzezinski says she gets her independence from her mother, sculptor Emilie, who clung fiercely to her identity as an artist even while playing the role of high-powered political wife in the late 1970s.

Her mom saw family as a gate to self-expression, and it’s surely a definition of motherhood that Brzezinski clings to as she struggles to integrate mother, wife, and journalist into a seamless identity.

To that end, Brzezinski has taken the next obvious step. She has a book due out by 2010 that addresses, among other subjects, balancing work with family, particularly her own journey toward realizing how her role as a journalist is an important part of what she wants to convey to her children.
“It also has a lot to do with what people are going through right now,” she says of the tome, under the Weinstein Books flag. “It’s a different look at self-reinvention and how it’s important to be able to take a step back.”

That sort of perspective made Brzezinski a staunch, if a bit incongruous, defender of former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

“I was transfixed by her,” Brzezinski says. “Here’s a cool, attractive woman with five kids who is wired to work — 150 percent. Not 80 percent or 50 percent. Not flex time. Not half time. She jumped into it without a shred of guilt on her face. I respect not only the fact that she shows no guilt about who she is, but that . . . her husband has no issue with it.”

She snatches a photograph from a vast bank of family pictures and memorabilia on the wall above her desk that includes a large shot of Carlie on horseback jumping over a white fence. She presents the photo, a snowy scene of their girls with her husband, crack WABC-TV News investigative reporter Jim Hoffer.

“Part of my balance is struck by the fact that I have a husband who has taken on everything that a wife would take on when her husband goes into politics. And he doesn’t feel bad about it — and he works full time.”

Working full time is not the half of it, she stresses. Hoffer is an “Emmy-magnet. We have so many Emmys in our house you can fall over them. And he takes on a hell of a lot with the kids, the household, everything. It wasn’t something we ever discussed. It just happened. And the more he takes on all these things . . . I find it very attractive.”

Of course this speaks directly to her admiration for the moose-hunting former VP hopeful. “I think the whole [Palin] family was incredibly progressive, including her husband, Todd. I’m discovering that conservative men are more progressive. The guy I work with, by the way — very progressive. Never once has Joe questioned whether I could rise to the occasion on something.”

Photo Credit: set/courtesy of MSNBC/virginia sherwood / camp david/hulton archive/getty images / daughters/joe kohen/wireimage/getty images

As originally published in Newsmax magazine.