EVEN IN SEATTLE'S more temperate liberal circles, Medved tends to get uninvited to the party, seven years after he arrived from L.A. with his three kids and wife Diane. (A clinical psychologist, she's co-author of The American Family with Dan Quayle and the new Saving Childhood: Protecting Our Children From the National Assault on Innocence with her husband.) "When we got an opportunity to do a Seattle radio show [at KVI in 1996], I think I surprised everybody by saying, 'Yeah, great!'" After 20 years, he says, "We were desperately trying to figure out a means of escaping L.A."
Our town's big advantage is the same one cited by celebrity immigrants like Michael Kinsley and Cameron Crowe: "People are nicer here. I like the vegetation and the sort of relative public safety that people in the Northwest take for granted." Seattle is also the antidote to "a lot of the stuff we're writing about in Saving Childhoodit's not by any means perfect in Seattle, but it's better. It strikes me about Seattle that most people don't appreciate what they have."
Rick Dahms
Barely seen in Seattle: movie moralist Michael Medved.
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Not that it's all paradise. "One of the things that has surprised me is the extent to which my political position has sort of left me to the side of the film community, such as it is." He loved doing a SIFF panel last year on "Why America Can't See (or Doesn't Want to See) Movies for Grown-Ups." "But it was, like, the first time anybody had asked me. The first two years I was here, I don't think I even got press accreditation for the festival." ("He didn't apply," says SIFF's Kathleen McInnis.)
In some ways, he rather fancies his status as an elder statesman of the "Support Our Troops" Red American electorate in Seattle's ocean of "No Iraq War" Blue. "I love being the skunk at the garden party," he says.
Though he's found a welcoming Orthodox Jewish congregation on Mercer Island, he says the broader Jewish community has not warmed to him. He calls himself "a minority within a minority within a minority." "One of the things that's most surprising to mebemused is the wordI used to come up all the time [from L.A.] as a guest speaker of the Jewish community, for different temples, for the Jewish Federation, for different fund-raising organizations, and I'd always jump at the chance to come to Seattle. But since I've been here [he laughs], it's like persona non grata. It's totally political. One of the leaders of the Seattle Jewish community pulled his advertising from KVI because I was on the stationand he didn't have any objection to Rush or to John Carlson, to other people, because they weren't Jewish." He adds: "I don't think that would happen today, because the Jewish community has shifted. I think Bush will come close to dividing the Jewish community, which no Republican has done in our lifetime. Reagan got about 35 percent in '84."
It could be that Medved's problemto the extent he has oneis not his conservatism but his outspokenness. The Seattle style isn't so much about political hue, but consensus, attempted politeness. We're as xenophobic as anyone, but while it's fine to cut someone dead, it's against the law here to raise your voice. "I'm not a screamer!" protests Medved. "Many people in talk radio are. I don't really think I have a polemical style." He only invites guests he disagrees with, on the theory that "we have all kinds of differences, but let's be nice about it."
On the whole, Medved gives a wholehearted thumbs-up to life in Seattle. "I do feel more at home here." Only one question continues to bedevil him: "If conservative ideas are so good, why is it that all the good places to live are so liberal?"
tappelo@seattleweekly.com
