Straight Talk.(Gwen Ifill)(Interview)

Byline: Julia Reed. editor: Valerie Steiker

To guide them through a volatile election season, Americans are turning to Washington Week's Gwen Ifill as a sane voice amid the hoopla .

It is the Friday after the New Hampshire primary, and legions of pundits, pollsters, and political operatives--and even the candidates themselves--are still trying to explain how the outcome of the race could have been so dramatically different from the near-universal predictions. On every political talk show on every network there is a mad, and generally very loud, scramble to offer up the winning theory, the sexy sound bite that will best sum up the fact that poll numbers and conventional wisdom were both so off that Hillary Clinton's own campaign had not prepared a victory speech. There was the race factor, of course, the possibility that people just did not want to tell pollsters they wouldn't vote for a black man ("White people lied"), and there were the women, who supported Hillary in record numbers ("The sisterhood beat the brotherhood"). There was the effect of Hillary's widely replayed "misty moment," as well as the effect of John McCain's appeal to independents siphoned (or not) from Barack Obama.

Three days into it, the verbal slugfest has not abated, but hope, finally, is on the horizon. I am on the set of PBS's Washington Week with Gwen Ifill, and she is about to lead, as she does for half an hour every Friday night, a live discussion of the week's events with people who have been on the actual ground covering them. She calls her show the "pundit-free zone," and she honors her own rule. When I ask her--off-camera and, if she wants, off the record--which theory she herself might favor, she refuses to take the bait. "All of the theories are really excellent theories, but each one of them has a fatal flaw. Nobody really knows. The Clintons don't even know. And that's what I love about this campaign."

In a city where everyone is trying to prove themselves the smartest person in the room--or indeed in the political universe--Ifill is a breathtaking anomaly, a quietly confident seasoned reporter who covered Congress and presidential politics for The Washington Post, The New York Times, and NBC News before joining PBS nine years ago as host of Washington Week and senior correspondent on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. In the nine years that she has been leading the 41-year-old show, viewers and critics alike have given her credit for making it smarter and fresher: She has reinvigorated the roundtable with new, younger faces and deftly keeps the conversation lively without violating her cardinal rule of no predictions. "If my guests make them, they don't come back," she tells me, adding that most of them find this proviso a great relief.

So apparently do the loyal viewers, who have inched up on her watch to reach almost 1.5 million--more than three times as many as those who watch, say, any of MSNBC's nightly political shows, including Hardball with Chris Matthews. The number is all the more impressive given that Washington Week airs on Friday night at eight o'clock. Its appeal clearly lies in its status as the graphics-free last bastion of thoughtful discussion--and in Ifill herself. "The thing about Gwen that makes her a great moderator and a great reporter--as well as a nice person--is that she doesn't insist on having the last word," says Jim Barnes, political correspondent at National Journal and a regular on Washington Week. "In this town, there is a lot of preening and competition among reporters to get the last word in, even in casual conversation."

"I keep myself out of it," she says of her dual roles as NewsHour reporter and Washington Week host. But she is not afraid to ask the tough or provocative question when the occasion calls for it, as she did in the 2004 vice-presidential debate: She asked Dick Cheney and John Edwards to address the growing AIDS crisis among black women in our own country, and neither of them had an answer. "That was the 'aha' moment for a lot of people with Gwen," one longtime Washington observer tells me. "She really drilled on them, and I thought, Man, this woman can change the weather."