Radio Star Rachel Maddow

Maddow has been with Air America since its inception in 2004, first co-hosting and later headlining her own show. The Rachel Maddow Show started out as a one-hour, early-morning affair, and now it's a two-hour, evening program that airs every weekday. The show features daily coverage of the war in Iraq and raises challenging, sociopolitical questions, but it also covers pop culture and current events with irreverent humor. Air America calls it a "one-stop shop for your daily allowance of news, sports, and lefty politics."

Maddow says she preps six hours for each show, even though she has heard that the rule of thumb in talk radio is that hosts are expected to put in one hour of prep time for every hour on air.

"Apparently I'm very slow," she said. Or just thorough.

She is a regular commentator on MSNBC, whose vice president of prime time programming has said that Maddow is "the universal donor of good chemistry. You can put her on to talk to just about anybody about just about anything, and she comes across as just so cheerful and hopeful and likable."

She rates herself as the second most, if not the most, left-leaning host on Air America, but said, "For some reason that doesn't make conservatives hate me. In the pundit world I realized that I'm the liberal who conservatives like, which is very unsettling."

She chalks it up partly to having come out at an early age: "You have to learn to survive and prosper in a hostile environment." It's something she feels has helped her in talking to hostile audiences. "It's kind of a talent that gay people bring to everything we do," she said, generously extrapolating her own talents to the larger community.

Maddow's co-conspirators on her show include Kent Jones (who joins her on air), a technical director, a senior producer, a part-time assistant and a very important woman who books all the guests and writes research files to prepare Maddow for talking to them.

"It's a big team for doing a two-hour show, but we're all running in a full-out sprint all day, every day," Maddow said.

It's a pace that doesn't leave time for much else. "I really thought that I would've written a book by now," she admitted. "I thought that I'd be blogging all the time, or working on trying to get myself a TV show, but this is really a full-time job. It takes everything that I've got. But it's satisfying to know that I'm working that hard for something that I'm really proud of."

Although she spends her work week in Manhattan, she and her partner of nearly eight years, artist Susan Mikula, share a home in western Massachusetts . The couple is not married, but Maddow says they're talking about it.

While she's adamant about gay people having equal marriage rights, Maddow has strong feelings about the ways gay men and lesbians have of respecting relationships "that aren't dependent on the social-approval stamp that we call marriage."

She pointed out, "We've come up with ways that we honor and acknowledge and respect each other's relationships without this one single hoop that everybody has to jump through to become an official couple. I like that about us." Which is why she has reservations about getting married.

"I'm for marriage rights in terms of what I want the laws to be," she explained, "but personally, in terms of how I culturally feel about my community and us losing something when we gain those marriage rights, I'm ambivalent."

Maddow has lived in Massachusetts since before gay marriage was legalized there and feels it has caused a cultural strain on the community: "All of our old mores, the old ways we honor and acknowledge relationships, now we have to decide if those are second-class and if marriage really is the gold standard, and if the old ways we did things actually weren't enough."

In terms of her professional goals, Maddow hopes to maintain the kind of consistent, creative, independent vision she sees in one of her favorite radio shows, NPR's This American Life. She said she never set out to be the likable liberal to the right wing she has somehow become.

"I'm just trying to give my take on the world," she said. "If it's persuasive, great. If it's not persuasive, I hope you'll at least be entertained and still listen to me." And so far, that's exactly what her large and growing audience is doing.