Maddow is cable talk's newest star

It is a showdown made in cable-talk heaven, and it will be a staple of "The Rachel Maddow Show," which premiered on MSNBC this week. Maddow, a 35-year-old lesbian and former San Francisco ACT-UP activist, squares off against 69-year-old Pat Buchanan, who in 1992 called for a Republican "cultural war" against gays.When Maddow heard Buchanan's Republican National Convention speech as a 19-year-old, it left her in tears and -- along with her San Francisco Bay Area upbringing -- inspired her along a life path where she now gets paid to argue with Buchanan. In between, she has unloaded trucks, worked in a jungle-themed espresso bar in San Francisco and served as a Rhodes scholar. She is perhaps the only person to have worked with both the arch-conservative Buchanan and hip-hop star DJ Chuck D, her former partner on the liberal Air America radio network.Armed with self-deprecating humor and an impressive intellect, Maddow is the newest marquee commentator on a network that finds itself in the middle of controversy about blurring the line between political commentary and straight reporting. MSNBC said this week that it was removing commentators Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews as hosts of its election-night coverage and replacing them with veteran newsman David Gregory. The pair will continue to provide commentary on those broadcasts.Maddow won't touch the turmoil, saying she doesn't follow media issues. She might be the only TV-talk-show host who doesn't own a television -- she hasn't since she left her folks' house to attend Stanford University."It's not like, 'Oh, I am too righteous for television,' " Maddow said over lunch recently during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. She lives in western Massachusetts with her partner of nine years and maintains an apartment in New York, where her nightly (9 p.m. EDT) show is produced."I have a constitutional weakness in which I am very easily distracted by flashing lights. If there is a TV on in the room, I can't have a conversation with you. I won't eat, I won't sleep, I'll just meld with my couch."Nonetheless, Maddow's fledgling show offers a glimmer of hope that civil conversation could occur on cable, even during a political campaign in which the networks spend hours parsing the meaning of "lipstick on a pig." Maddow, who describes herself as a "progressive" but not a partisan, promises that her hourlong show will violate two cardinal rules of cable:No. 1.: Only one guest will appear at a time. Any more than that, and nobody understands what's being said.No. 2: People who disagree with the host will be given equal footing. Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party presidential candidate who as a Republican congressman from Georgia led the impeachment against President Bill Clinton, has stopped by.And there's sly humor. The name of the regular Buchanan bit is called "It's Pat" -- a nod to the recurring 1990s "Saturday Night Live" skit about the androgynous character Pat."No, I'm not sure if Pat is hip to" the reference, said the show's executive producer, Bill Wolff.Her progressive sensibilities were formed in the Bay Area. And she always has excelled at talking."She was born grown-up. She never talked baby talk," said her mother, Elaine. She read the newspaper cover-to-cover starting in second grade and began asking questions.Tall -- 5 foot 11 -- and competitive, Maddow was a three-sport athlete (volleyball, basketball and swimming) in high school. After wrecking her shoulder playing volleyball her senior year, she found herself with more free time. So she began sneaking off to work in an AIDS clinic without telling her parents. "You didn't talk about those issues at that time," Elaine Maddow said."I was a gay kid growing up in the Bay Area in the '90s," said Rachel Maddow, who came out when she was 17. "I understood that there was chance (because of AIDS) that my community would not exist in the future."She graduated from Stanford in 3-1/2 years but never felt comfortable there. "I just sort of felt culturally alienated. I had never understood at age 17 that there was an upper class," said Maddow, whose father, Bob, is an attorney. "I thought I was upper class. (Stanford) was set up for rich kids who had been to private school."After graduating, she bolted for San Francisco, where she began working as an activist for ACT-UP. She focused on ensuring that HIV-positive prison inmates got medicine.After returning from the Rhodes program, she stayed with family friends in Massachusetts while she finished her dissertation. It was there that friends encouraged Maddow to enter an open audition for a morning radio job. She had never heard the show, didn't like getting up early and had never been on the radio.She got the job. Soon, through the help of a friend who slipped her audition tape to an Air America producer, she latched onto the network. After she appeared on CNN and elsewhere over the past few years, in January MSNBC snagged her as a regular pundit for its gaggle of political shows.And this week, she playfully introduced Buchanan on her show as "my fake Uncle Pat" and thanked him for appearing. Buchanan grumbled that she probably wouldn't do so in a few minutes. Then, for the next four minutes, they brawled nose-to-nose, albeit civilly. (Off-air, she describes Buchanan as "very gentle.")(E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli(at)sfchronicle.com.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)