IN MY SHOES: What It’s Like To Be Andrew Breitbart
Time magazine profiles the “merry prankster,” Matt Drudge and Arianna Huffington protégé, and founder of a Big empire in the making:
Andrew Breitbart sits in an Aeron chair at an iMac computer gazing out the sliding glass door of his Los Angeles home office. On the patio, a hula hoop and a portable basketball rim await his children's return from school. Breitbart, 41, dressed on this late-winter day in his standard work uniform of a dirty oxford-cloth shirt and grungy khaki shorts, looks more like a surf bum than one of the most divisive figures in America's political and culture wars. …
Breitbart was raised in Brentwood, on Los Angeles' privileged west side. The area is home to studio executives and producers, and the politics are Democratic. Breitbart was never fully comfortable in L.A.'s '80s social milieu. His parents are Midwestern Jews. …
By the time Breitbart entered the Brentwood School, an élite private academy, he was out of step with his classmates. "Andrew didn't fit the mold," says Larry Solov, a friend since childhood and now Breitbart's partner in the Big sites. "At Brentwood, you got A's and bought into a system set up to get you into an Ivy League college. Andrew got C's." Soon enough, Breitbart adopted the guise of skeptic and prankster, staging acts of subversion designed to win laughs and undermine the school's prevailing assumptions about wealth and meritocracy. It wouldn't be Harvard for this wiseacre. He was going to Tulane. …
It is a brilliant weekday afternoon, and Breitbart is at the wheel of his Range Rover, driving to the Los Angeles bureau of Fox News to make a live appearance on Fox's politics and business show America's Nightly Scoreboard. He'll then tape a segment for the late-night talkfest Red Eye, whose host, Greg Gutfeld, is a contributor to Big Journalism. …
"I feel very alive," Breitbart says as he whips along backstreets adjacent to the 405 freeway, where traffic is at a standstill. "We're in a battle, and in hindsight I can see that the moves I'm making are correct. I'm putting together something that's going to be extraordinary."
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