CNN's Larry King on the Left

By Paul Bedard, Washington Whispers

Interviewer Larry King's on-camera politics are inscrutable. But the CNN host comes clean about his lefty views in his autobiography, My Remarkable Journey, which landed in bookstores this week. King worries the disclosures might affect his objective image. "I talked to officials at CNN about it," he says. "But if you're writing an autobiography, you'd be comatose not to have opinions on certain things. You hit a certain age and if you don't have opinions, people think there's something the matter." King says his left-of-center politics—anti-Iraq war, against the death penalty, and for a sturdy social safety net—grew out of his childhood in Depression Brooklyn. "Policies for the poor helped me," says King, 75. "New York City bought me my first pair of glasses." Still, Lefty Larry isn't an Obamatron—yet. "He's so new upon the scene," King says. "The No. 1 thing he has that you can't invent, teach, or buy is likability. But where's the elements? Where's the fill down? We don't know yet."

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