Read Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America for Free Online

the day after he was baptized. The agent had just told Beck that he should speak to Gabe Hobbs, a Mormon executive with Clear Channel radio—when Hobbs himself called on the other line. Hobbs got him an afternoon talk show in Tampa—a big boost in his visibility and a change in format from music to talk that would launch him to stardom.
    An account Beck gave Forbes magazine, however, tells a less miraculous tale that has nothing to do with the baptism. In this version, Beck already had the offer from Tampa: “In the late 1990s [Beck is fuzzy on dates], while filling in as a talk-radio host at WABC in New York City, Beck got a lucky call from media agent George Hiltzik, who had been tipped off by the program director. Beck told him he had an offer to do talk radio in Tampa.”
    As for Beck’s “focus on family,” he moved to Tampa and left his kids behind in Connecticut with their mother. When callers to his show criticized him for leaving eleven-year-old Mary (his daughter who has cerebral palsy) and eight-year-old Hannah, he pronounced that criticism “over the line.” Beck told the St. Petersburg Times at the time that “I beat myself up enough for that.”
    He wondered on air if he’d made a mistake leaving his children, but he evidently decided he had not. Seven years later, he said he was still trying to “visit them regularly.” In the meantime, he had two more children with Tania: a daughter, Cheyenne, and an adopted son named Raphe.
    Beck admired the inner peace of the Mormons. “I want to be like that,” he said. Yet the Mormons weren’t entirely sure they wanted him. According to the Deseret News: “When Beck was to be ordained into the LDS priesthood, his name was presented to the congregation for a sustaining vote, as is customary in the church. In a highly unusual occurrence, one man opposed the ordination, later telling local leaders, ‘Have you heard his show?’ ”
    “I agreed with him,” Beck admitted in one of his more candid moments. He worried that his on-air antics would make people “think that’s the way Mormons are.” Added Beck: “I do stuff on the show every day that I regret or question. My language is loose. I’m just different. Every day I get off the air, I think, ‘Lord, help me be better. How do I balance this and be a good reflection of you?’ I don’t think I hit it very often.”
    But what he does do very often is employ the story of his redemption and his family to make a point on television and radio.
    At the Conservative Political Action Conference, he proposed a twelve-step program for Republicans: “I’m a recovering alcoholic. I screwed up my life six ways to Sunday and I believe in redemption. But the first step to getting redemption is you’ve got to admit you’ve got a problem … ‘Hello, my name is the Republican Party, and I’ve got a problem. I’m addicted to spending and big government.’ ”
    After Democrats lost some off-year elections, Beck said of President Obama: “As a recovering alcoholic, may I say I recognize denial? … It’s like coming to in the bathroom on the floor, naked, for like the fifteenth day in a row.” Beck also found in his addiction the laissez-faire wisdom of the free market: “I can tell you with certainty, if no one allowed me to fail, if there were no consequences for my actions, if I kept my family, my job, my house, my wealth, everything else, I wouldn’t be able to stop drinking.”
    Beck’s special-needs daughter, too, provides a common Beck touchstone—perseverance. He had been told that Mary, who had several strokes at the time of her birth, would never “walk or talk or feed herself. She went to college. They were wrong,” Beck exulted one night on Fox. Another time, he described how Mary ran cross-country in high school and finished “in last place every single race she ran,” but still she “completed every race.”
    Why the constant references to his addictions and his daughter’s