Opinion: Scott Hennen is a real good friend of Karl Rove’s and others
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ST. PAUL -- Scott Hennen’s personal phone book contains the numbers of some of the nation’s top political leaders, strategists and experts. And when he leaves a message, they call him back.
The animated, 43-year-old Hennen is one of the better-informed, better-known of a legion of regional radio talk-show hosts, most of them conservative, who chatter on hour after hour weekday after weekday across the heartland in between ads for mattresses and mufflers.
The talk shows are deemed quite influential, not so much in telling listeners from state to state what to think, but what to think about.
Hennen, for example, was going on this week about...
...Barack Obama’s negative comments about bitter, gun-toting, religion-clinging smalltown America, what that says about his Eastern elitism and the small-town life that produced Sen. John McCain’s popular vice presidential running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. (See amazingly amateur video below.)
The regional talk-radio hosts, who differ from the bigfoot national ones like Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, Bill O’Reilly, Dennis Prager and the hugest elephant in the Republican talkosphere, Rush Limbaugh, are an important communications tool for politicians.
They regularly make themselves available to sympathetic talkers to offer up their insights and the day’s political talking points and, thereby, reach thousands of potential voters in one free swoop. Most shows also take phone-ins.
Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr (hey, how’d he get in here?) was working the tables this week along Radio Row at the Republican National Convention, along with Sens. Rick Santorum and Orrin Hatch and, former Sens. George Allen and Fred Thompson.
A Minnesota native, Hennen is a veteran who first worked in radio at the age of 12 and never left. He’s developed a devoted following across the Dakotas, where several stations now carry his two-hour show. And he talks an extra hour for his home base in Fargo, followed by the broadcast behemoth, Limbaugh.
Hennen’s got his own website with archived interviews and live streaming and actually owns his own new station, KCNN, a powerful 50,000-watt station better known on-air as AM 1100 The Flag.
Hennen calls himself The Chairman of the Common Sense Club, and he can be viewed online waving his arms around in rhetorical outrage while his brother Chris helps man the controls.
‘Radio is just part of who I am,’ says Hennen, who quickly chews a wad of bubble gum during commercial breaks to refresh his overworked mouth.
One of his regular guests is former White House strategist Karl Rove, now a Fox News analyst, who again offered his partisan insights to Hennen’s listeners from St. Paul this week.
‘Scott’s one of the best going,’ says Rove.
-- Andrew Malcolm
Video by Andrew Malcolm