Let's forget about ideology for a minute: Donahue looks AWFUL. He grimaces towards the camera, he looks excessive, hyper emotional. I never liked or disliked him before, but during the election when he talked in favor of Nader on one show he was personally obnoxious. This has been exaggerated multifold. I do not mean it as a cheap swipe when I say: perhaps it is a sign of age -- perhaps the qualities that caused him to have empathy with viewers when he was younger have vanished. I truly don't think it's just ideology with him anymore. He looks BAD and EXCESSIVE. He make Geraldo look like a Yogi.
Donahue does have a herky-jerky, bug-eyed mannerism I'll grant you, but it all pales next to his politics.
Americans simply don't want to hear the crapola that Donahue offers up. Our free-market system will take care of him, unless, of course, he snags some radio gig on NPR.
. He grimaces towards the camera, he looks excessive, hyper emotional. I never liked or disliked him before, but during the election when he talked in favor of Nader on one show he was personally obnoxious. This has been exaggerated multifold Personally, I think he always did these things, and you just didn't notice it before. IMHO, he has always been an obnoxious jerk who was so needy for the approval of the bored women who made up his audience that he pandered to his audience by portraying white males as the devil.
Of course, he seemed personally horrified that he was in fact a white male, but he wanted his audience to know HE WAS DIFFERENT, he was a Renaissance Man, a True Feminist and an Enlightened Traitor to his evil race and gender. Bitter women and liberal masochists loved him, but most guys just wanted to puke when they saw him.
Then, his time passed, he ran out of truly thought-provoking material and degenerated into a circus act, and he went off the air, and now he's making his "comeback". But this is a different time, a different generation. Gender Feminism and Alan Alda/Phil Donahue-style male self-hatred aren't "cutting edge" any more.
So Phil is a has-been. That's why he's coming across as... well, the best way I could describe it is as a bad parody of himself.