FLAVIA OF THE MONTH

Who's that 20-something talking head on cable with the Philly accent - and the attitude to match?

[PHILADELPHIA Magazine, November 2001]

By Sasha Issenberg
Photo by Bill Streicher

FLAVIA COLGAN IS A PRIM AND ELEGANT 23-year-old Democratic Party loyalist who has high cheekbones and says things like, "I am obsessed with civic engagement." In a more innocent time, a young woman with similar earnestness might have become a social studies teacher and headed the local League of Women Voters chapter. Colgan, however, is currently managing a statewide judicial campaign, and recently earned a berth in the stable of professional pundits at the Fox News cable channel. As a paid political "contributor" - the same title held by such heavies as Dick Morris and Newt Gingrich - Colgan now makes the rounds on Fox's combative, high-volume chat shows. "It's baptism by fire," she says. "It's like playing on a minor-league team four or five times and being told you're going to start on the Phillies."

Just over two years ago, Colgan was a freshly minted Harvard graduate who'd majored in religion and spent a peripatetic youth schooled in places as diverse as the Dominican Republic and Shipley. She got her last name from an Irish-American father and her first from a Brazilian mother. The yen for politics most likely came from her mother's second husband, well-connected attorney William T. Coleman III, who was Bill Clinton's general counsel to the Army. In the brief interval since college, Colgan has interned for a federal judge; worked at a local law firm; bought and managed residential properties in Fairmount; raised funds for a handful of Democratic causes; and managed Catherine Baker Knoll's failed campaign for state treasurer. Now she has to mix her duties as a pundit-in-training with those she bears as campaign manager for David Wecht, a Democrat seeking a spot on the state Superior Court. Wecht, who heads Allegheny County's unglamorous Register of Wills office, tries not to begrudge Colgan's abrupt rise to the national stage. "She's a tremendous person with a lot of promise, and she can pursue anything she wants," he says. "For now, I am just interested in her helping me win this race."

AT 10:15 A.M. ON A RECENT FRIDAY, COLGAN bounds out of her Rittenhouse Square apartment, expecting to find a car and driver. A white limo idles out front. "Did they tell you I was having some kind of party?" she hollers to the driver as she flops into the backseat. "This is a big car for a little girl."

On this particular morning, Colgan awoke at 4 a.m. in Pittsburgh, caught the first flight to Philly, and visited her apartment only long enough to put on makeup, a necklace, and a newly acquired black dress. Now she's off to a Race Street television studio, where she will videotape her second-ever national appearance, for the Fox show Judith Regan Tonight.

The Fox gig means Colgan will occasionally have to sit in this dark, empty room with a video image of Philadelphia's skyline behind her, and offer opinions into a camera lens, jousting via satellite with people she can only hear through an earphone. Media critics have denounced Fox's coverage for its superficiality and rightward tilt, but the network has pounded rivals CNN and MSNBC in the ratings by emphasizing round- the-clock confrontation. Though new to the game, Colgan already seems to have nailed its basics, supplying the requisite tone of high-octane outrage and snappy, prefabricated lines such as, "I think if you need focus groups, you have no focus."

She landed her Fox contract in a new-media equivalent of Lana Turner's discovery at the soda counter. A Fox News exec summering at the Shore spotted her fulminating about Gary Condit on WPVl's Sunday Live show. After a who's-that-girl call went out to the station, Colgan met with Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who offered her a deal on the spot.

With her taping for the day completed, Colgan returns home to make some fund-raising calls, then boards a train to Harrisburg fot a weekend-long Democratic party gathering. Statewide campaigns in Pennsylvania can be grueling. "My friends say, 'Oh, it's so much fun. You go to all these fund-raisers,'" she says. "In fact, most of my time is spent at county fairs and Rotary clubs. It's not glamorous at all."

© 2001 Philadelphia Magazine. Reproduced with permission.

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