Arianna, Warts & All: The New Yorker has devoted a dozen tart pages to the ups and downs of blogger queen, political gossipster supreme, ex-Montecitan, and wanted-to-be California governor Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington.

All the old nasty quotes about Arianna come out like daggers from under the table. “The most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus,” goes one, dating I think to Greek-born Arianna’s Montecito days with hubby Michael Huffington. He bought a House of Representatives seat and nearly one in the Senate, spending an estimated 30 million family petro dollars in the process.

I recall a lunch with Michael at the Wine Cask one day when he chuckled over a line in my column, which I didn’t coin, to the effect that in most campaigns a candidate asks people for money, but Huffington is so rich he sends people money.

Arianna decamped from Montecito after the Senate loss, leaving behind enough enemies to fill the Coral Casino. She divorced Michael (who later outed himself in Esquire magazine as bisexual), palled around with the likes of then-GOP star Newt Gingrich, admired John McCain, then turned progressive, and now runs the hottest blog in the country.

She has sharp ears for chit-chat. Last May, according to the New Yorker, she wrote that McCain had remarked to her at a dinner party some years earlier that he hadn’t voted for George W. Bush. McCain’s people denied this.

Now that she’s supporting Barack Obama (backed him over Hillary Clinton) she puts down McCain as old and cranky, his campaign “fear-based, smear-based.” In return, a McCain aide told the Washington Post, “She’s a flake and a poser and an attention-seeking diva.”

But the heavy-hitters flock to contribute to her Huffington Post and it’s a must-read for politico-buffs. Major corporations advertise there. In August, according to the New Yorker, her liberal-oriented site logged 5.1 million unique visitors.

She somehow has time to write: Her 12th book is entitled, How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution and Made Us All Less Safe (And What You Need to Know to End the Madness).

Arianna has proven that she can take a punch as well as deliver one. Years ago, after I made some negative comments about her, she invited me up to her Montecito mansion (she lives in L.A. now), where her mother, the wonderful, gracious, late Elli, made snacks as we talked.

Santa Barbara Independent columnist Nick Welsh, however, may not make her next political salon. In 1994, Welsh raked the Huffington Senate campaign over the fact that she had hired an illegal-immigrant nanny for their two girls, while her husband talked about cracking down on illegal immigration. At the time, Michael’s TV-based campaign was within grasp of defeating Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Welsh, of course, wasn’t the only one writing about the affair, but he was the home-town columnist. Arianna “then produced an affidavit, signed by (the nanny’s husband), saying that Welsh had offered him money and a green card in exchange for stories, which he denied,” the magazine wrote. (Since I have never been able to even squeeze coffee money out of Nick, and never heard, despite the power of the press, that he had the power to issue green cards, I tend to believe his denial.) In any case, many say the nanny business helped cost Michael the election. He finished less than two percentage points behind Dianne. The Montecito gossip at the time was that Arianna really had her eye on the White House.

A few years later political consultant Ed Rollins, who worked on the campaign, published a memoir calling Arianna “the most ruthless, unscrupulous, and ambitious person I’d met in 30 years of national politics.” He claimed that she’d hired private eyes to track Maureen Orth, who was writing a piece for Vanity Fair. “I have never hired a private investigator,” Arianna says. But, now willing to let political bygones be bygones, she’s invited Rollins to blog for the Huffington Post.

In 2003, Arianna joined a crowded field running for governor but pulled out when her chances dimmed. Few would deny that she’s smart as a whip, and you have to wonder what would have happened if she had ended up (unlikely as it might seem) as First Lady or governor.

Recession or Not? Making the rounds of downtown Santa Barbara’s white-tablecloth restaurants Saturday night, I found them too jammed with high spenders to be able to get a table. But cartoons in the New Yorker tell another story of the downturn. A woman at a cocktail party asks a middle-aged guy in a suit: “A banker, eh? Can you make a living at that?” In another cartoon, a guy arrives home, briefcase in hand and tie loosened: “Honey, we’re homeless.” In a third, a man in a tux with a “Just Married” sign on his back, accompanied by his bride wearing a long wedding gown, trudge the sidewalk dragging a trail of rattling tin cans.

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