Conservatively speaking, they loved Sean Hannity
09/22/06 11:41 PM
By ED BARK
Lame of foot and lamer in the view of a loud, opinionated SMU crowd, Alan Colmes took another verbal pasting Friday night while sparring partner Sean Hannity was asked when he's going to run for president.
You might say that a packed house at McFarlin Auditorium tilted heavily to the right and toward Hannity, who knows how to exploit such situations.
"by the way, are there any liberals out there?" Colmes asked hopefully, drawing a mini-round of applause.
"No, Allen, no liberals. This is a crowd of normal Americans," Hannity retorted to boisterous acclamation.
Colmes couldn't catch a break, even though he at least didn't break an ankle during a recent running mishap that required him to wear a surgical boot onstage.
"You don't have a leg to stand on," a Hannity fan yelled at Colmes.
It was all part of the warmup for a live telecast of Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes tied to the all-news network's 10th anniversary on Oct. 6. Dallas was the first in a 10-city stop, with a colorful touring bus proclaiming, "Thank you America. For Making Us #1. The Most Powerful Name in News."
At a pre-game VIP reception, Hannity came upon former Northern Exposure star Janine Turner, whose politics are simpatico. They both admitted to having crushes on each other before the now Dallas-based Turner asked her eight-year-old daughter, Juliette, "You know what we have on every night?"
"Fox News," the kid responded.
Colmes also had an actress ally in SMU's own Morgan Fairchild, who agreed to do Friday's show at his request. Fairchild, Turner and former Dallas Cowboys star Randy White later teamed up for a "Lone Star All-Stars" panel in the second half of the show.
"Morgan, you are hot!" an audience member blurted during a commercial break.
"I didn't know conservatives had those feelings," Colmes shot back. But he was shot down again by a crowd-pleaser from the crowd: "Why do you think there are so many of us?"
The audience also treated scandal-ridden former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Houston as a conquering hero. Both DeLay and Hannity predicted that Republicans would rally to keep control of the House despite polls predicting a likely Democratic takeover.
"The base is coming back, and the Republicans are enjoying it," DeLay said.
Before entering the lion's den, Colmes said his decade as Hannity's partner has "been a great opportunity for me to walk on a stage figuratively and do interviews with world leaders and talk about politics in a venue that's heavily watched. It's a dream job. There's no better place to do it."
Others see him as Hannity's hapless punching bag, but Colmes said that "more independents and Democrats watch us than the other two (cable news) networks combined because of the size of our audience...We have a large number of people of all political stripes watching us and working at Fox, believe it or not. There's no political litmus test to work in our newsroom."
But Hannity has become one of political conservatism's reigning rock stars while Colmes still plays a banjo.
"I don't feel anything but gratitude for having an opportunity to work here and to really grow in this field of journalism that I love," Hannity said. "Honestly."
Whatever the political climate, "people miss the secret of the success of our show," he said. "We talk about the news. We give information that you're not going to get elsewhere. We do it in an entertaining way and we've always got a smile on our face. So that's really the formula, but don't tell anybody."
Actually he was kidding -- about not telling anybody. But it's easier to be on top of your game when an audience is roughly 95 percent behind you, which was the case Friday night.
Hannity's oft-deployed impression of Bill Clinton got big laughs, as did virtually anything he said at Colmes' expense. The latter kept on punching, though. "Bill Clinton. All right, he screwed women," Colmes acknowledged. "George W. Bush is screwing the country."
Boooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
It just wasn't his night.