Katrina vanden Heuvel (Getty Images)

It’s time to do some good: this year’s NYU Cancer Institute Gala honors the university’s progress against cancer with a passel of honorees, all of whom are working to eradicate the disease and palliate its effects. Meanwhile, The New School features a chat between prominent public liberals including Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation and Chris Hayes of that early, early morning show on MSNBC. They and others will be discussing “the role of progressives in the next election.” As we go to press, we have absolutely no idea if the shifting tides of news will make this event high-spirited and giggly or grimly determined!

NYU Cancer Institute Gala, Plaza Hotel, 768 Fifth Avenue, 6pm, tickets and information can be obtained by calling (212) 404-3551; The Nation at The New School discussion, The New School auditorium, 66 West 12th Street, 7pm, free and open to the public.

So just how fully are vanden Heuvel and her tradition-minded, left-leaning magazine embracing the disorientingly disintermediated world of Web 3.0? We sat down with the longtime editor in her Irving Place office to discuss The Nation's new life online.

What were the shortcomings of the last site?

We wanted to redesign because media is changing, media is changing quickly. There were all these new tools that we weren't able to access.

How much were you thinking about turning a profit with the new design?

Unlike, say, The New Republic, we've decided that we will have some of our content behind the pay wall, but we believe in the democratizing ethos of the Internet. We want our ideas and our reporting in the debate.

David Carr and I were in a debate together once, and the two of us were on one side. It was "Good Riddance to the Mainstream Media?," and we were opposed to that. Michael Wolff was on the other side. David Carr brilliantly, at the end of the debate, held up this, like, papier mache from Michael Wolff's site [Newser]. And Carr cut out all the stories on Michael Wolff's site that had come from print. It was like a flapping skeleton in the wind with all these holes.

What does that mean for The Nation?

The Internet is still living off of media that invests in journalism, that does the editing, that does the rigorous reporting. That's still the bread and butter of a magazine like The Nation. That's different from a blog that arises.

Are there other redesigns that you think were especially successful?

Redesigns are very tricky. I think you often hear from those who are most agitated by them.

I think The Atlantic redesign (and I didn't follow it as carefully as some) had an issue because they seemed to have alienated some of the bloggers that they spent a lot of time wooing, attracting, funding, and that to me seemed tricky.

I think the site looks good. It looked good before, so you always wonder.

How did you get former Editor & Publisher editor Greg Mitchell to blog for you?

I've known Greg for years. In the years running up to the war in Iraq, he really made Editor & Publisher a go-to place to understand what we know now about how the media fell down in doing what it should have done around that war.

I'm confident that his work for the site is going to be engaging based on his Twitter life, which is about as intense as mine.

The Nation just won a Shorty. Do you have a Twitter strategy?

Yeah, we won a Shorty. I mean, I didn't know what this thing was. I do Twitter a lot, but it's kind of wild  — The Nation winning a Shorty for political reporting.

I'm probably the first Nation editor who's a Twitter addict.

Do you think we are reaching a point where we understand how to use the Internet well enough and there won't be so much redesigning?

I think there is too quick a view that the internet is all scrim and scram and this and that. There is a lot of aggregation still going on, and it's still in its infancy.

The next five years are going to be a period of sorting out. The New York Times is going to launch its long-awaited pay wall, and the Journal is already partly there. Some of the titans of media are talking, 'we really need to get back some of what we're investing.' I don't know where it all heads. You could have an internet where it's all Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian all the time

Would The Nation be a part of that internet?

At the end of the week we know what has lead the site — we have most-read, most-emailed. We will never be in the business of assigning stories to get clicks. To do editing by metrics is tricky.

On Friday, Apple sold its one-millionth iPad. Is that encouraging for you?

We don't sit around here going 'to app or not to app?' We are app! We have an app already, it's [one of the top 300 paid apps internationally], I mean it's all relative.

We want to use these platforms. I was on the train yesterday and there was a guy sitting behind me on his iPad editing, and his wife was angry because she wanted to use it. Look at the world we're in.

For example, he has said things like, “We have to make sure we’re not in the business of prosecuting everybody that is arrested, but prosecuting only those people who are guilty.” And early on, he called for an independent investigation into what he said could be "gay profiling."

Even Aborn's law-and-order endorsers come with unimpeachably liberal credentials, like LAPD chief Bill Bratton, who, New York Democrats will remember approvingly, was eventually pushed out by Rudy Giuliani.

But today, maybe the clearest sign that Aborn is playing a slightly different game than his opponents: the campaign announced an endorsement from Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation. 

On her blog, vanden Heuvel writes that the election “is providing a unique opportunity for a progressive re-envisioning of our criminal justice system.”

She goes on:

“Aborn speaks openly about the injustice of nearly one out of three African-American men spending part of their lifetime in jail, and the need to address the fact that four out of five young people are re-arrested within a few years of their first offense. In plainly addressing facts that politicians are too cautious to bring up, he's reminding Americans who may have forgotten the full meaning of 'justice' in the 'criminal justice' system.”

This week the Steamroller has been on a roll, writing columns about the financial mess on Slate, appearing to talk about it on national TV and on the radio at WNYC, giving an interview to the Times and floated across a magazine cover as the best next Treasury secretary. That's all in a week.

We had an inkling of this back to December, when we first learned he'd be writing a biweekly column for Slate about finance and politics, something that seemed to position him on the slow road to a comeback.

And then this last week, with AIG and American populist rage in the news, we saw a Spitzer boomlet. The crackdown artist has increased his metabolism on Slate, with not one, not two, but three columns published there in the last week.

There was an appearance on the Brian Lehrer show. "As you suggested, there was a period when as attorney general of New York I was pursuing issues that nobody else wanted to pursue," said Mr. Spitzer to Mr. Lehrer, barely concealing his glee. "And we pursued AIG and Wall Street’s structural failures in a way that others shied away from because it was politically unpalatable for them to address those issues. Now it is the flavor of the month."

We'll say!

There was a quote in Joe Nocera’s Saturday Times business column where he was posed as a genius on AIG. On Sunday, there was an appearance on Fareed Zakaria GPS, a friendly forum where he also talked about those bonuses.

And then, there's his byline, on the cover of Newsweek yesterday, floating over a stock photo of a torches-and-pitchforks crowd. Inside the magazine, there’s Mr Spitzer's restrained, stoic piece, explaining that civil debate is the way out of the financial mess.

"What we need to restore to the Washington debate is logic, not anger; principles, not wrath," he wrote in his Newsweek piece.

As of this morning, it is both the most emailed and most viewed story on their Web site.  

And then, finally, Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote for The Nation's Web site yesterday that Mr. Spitzer would make a fine candidate to replace Tim Geithner.

“Spitzer took on Wall Street's metastasizing corruption before the meltdown,” she wrote. “He defended consumers' and taxpayers' rights. He speaks with passion and clarity about what went wrong and what needs to be done to restore integrity to our system. He is chastened by personal scandal, yet untouched by complicity in Wall Street's public scandals which have obliterated peoples' savings and devastated our country. Spitzer for Treasury Secretary?”

Welcome to the Spitzer resurrection project of 2009. (Why, we didn't even mention the Vogue spread that Silda Wall Spitzer got in March!)

“He’s really invigorated,” said David Plotz, his editor at Slate. Mr. Plotz said he is an easy edit. He’s fast, clear, insightful. And he’s especially aces on the AIG stuff.

"The column has worked out incredibly well, for us and for him," he said. "These are subjects he knows intimately and that he was prescient when he was in public office. And he says what he thinks!"

“We reached out to Spitzer at mid-week as we were thinking of which voices might add value to the debate over populism,” said Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek.

And maybe this is exactly the job Mr. Spitzer wants. To serve as a Sunday-style talk show pundit. An attorney general without the subpoena power, or the political headaches.

But is there more to the Spitzer boomlet than meets the eye? His regular column appears in Slate, owned by the Washington Post Company. Newsweek? Also owned by the Washington Post Company. And by appearing on CNN with Fareed Zakaria, he got to speak to a Newsweek international editor.

When he made his biggest splash in public life after he resigned in disgrace in March 2008, it was in the editorial pages of (where else?) The Washington Post.  It was that column that prompted Slate Group editor Jacob Weisberg to get Mr. Spitzer under contract. That, along with the fact that former Slate publisher Cliff Sloan, one of Mr. Spitzer's closest friends going back to their days at Harvard Law together, wanted Mr. Spitzer to return to public life as a writer, and doing it for Slate.

"It seemed to be a natural fit.," said Mr. Sloan, who is now a partner at Skadden in their D.C. office. "It definitely is something I mentioned to [Eliot] and to Jacob. And they, along with David Plotz, had further discussions."

Was that perhaps why we were noticing so much encouragement from Washington Post properties?

"I was involved with helping the initial introductions at Slate," he said. "I haven’t been involved since then."

“I have always admired him, and think his fall is a genuine tragedy,” said Mr. Meacham, explaining why he chose him to write an essay for their cover package. “We like having voices from the arena, and nobody spent as much time on these issues as he did as AG.”

We remember Mr. Spitzer was a hero in his AG days. But we also remember a first-year governorship that couldn't seem to expand the platform from raiding the Wall Street raiders to running a state. Mr. Spitzer, like so many before him, thought that Albany must be reformable, if Wall Street could be reformed. He only had a year, but there wasn't much there to prove him right. There was lots of disappointment before Ashley Dupre was a twinkle in the New York Post's eye.

So in a way it's no wonder that Mr. Spitzer is in demand now; it's back-to-square-one time, and Mr. Spitzer seems to be bringing all of his Sisyphean strength to bear on the project.

“There are different kinds of resurrections,” said Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “This obviously is one that is based on his personal desire to reenter respectable society. And there’s a tradition in American life—not just in politics—that when people pay their penalty and suffer appropriately for their crimes and misdeeds, then they should be able to reenter respectable society.”

But: “That’s a giant leap away from ever again getting elected to public office or being appointed. His days in any type of public office are over. You don’t resign the New York governorship in disgrace and then get elected to something else.”

Well, Ms. vanden Heuvel seems to think that at least an appointment can be managed now!

Anyway there was no use speculating so we called Mr. Spitzer to find out what he's really up to here.

He called us back late yesterday afternoon to say that he was on vacation with his kids; he said he doesn't really want to do interviews right now. Presumably, that is, interviews on the topic of Eliot Spitzer. Finally he gave in, albeit briefly.

"At rare moments, I’ll do my best to add to the public conversation," Mr. Spitzer said. "I’m a private citizen, which I’m fully enjoying."

We'll report back to you in short order.

Well, if the current bids on The Nation's First Ever Online Auction are any guide, it'll cost you upwards of $2,500, but really, according to the description of the item, its estimated value is "priceless."

Other items for sale include a signed copy of Victor Navasky's A Matter of Opinion and original art by Edward Sorel and George Shreiber.

There's also an autographed DVD of John Cusack's Mark Leyner-cowritten movie War, Inc. that's currently at $80, perfect for that Halliburton-hating, Military-Industrial-Complex dismantler on your Holiday gift list.

Except that the speculation may have just taken a twist that the Powell talk never did: There’s suddenly reason to believe there might be something to it.

The twist was provided by, of all people, Dan Senor, a Republican talking head who was once the spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. During the weekly political roundtable on ABC’s This Week, Senor announced that Rice is “actively, actually, campaigning for this” and that she presented herself 10 days ago to the meeting of conservative heavyweights convened by Grover Norquist every Wednesday—“and she wasn’t there to talk about the NATO meeting in Bucharest.”

Until this point, it’s been easy to dismiss the Rice speculation as the product of a celebrity-driven press corps. Publicly, she’s adamantly maintained both a desire to leave Washington and government at the end of the Bush administration and an utter disinterest in running for public office. But Senor is right: Wednesday Group ring-kissing thoroughly undercuts that posture.

If she really does want the VP slot, John McCain would be well-advised to give Rice a long, hard look. Just like McCain, logic says that any national political aspirations that Rice may harbor should be DOA, thanks to the disastrously unpopular war for which she is in no small part responsible. But, again like McCain, there is reason to believe that Rice’s personal appeal remains strong, even to independent voters who long ago turned on the war.

Public opinion polling on cabinet members is spotty, but two polls released last year gave Rice approval ratings near 60 percent, about twice her disapproval rating. These numbers are the exact opposite of her boss’s—even though her fingerprints are all over the foreign policy that, more than anything, has dragged George W. Bush’s popularity into the gutter. Another survey released last year found that about twice as many people have a favorable personal opinion of Rice compared to those who don’t.

This data confirms what has been clear for a while: Rice is one of a very few high-profile figures whose standing with the public hasn’t measurably eroded through a close association with the Bush White House. And it reinforces what, through McCain’s resurgence, we have learned (yet again) about mass opinion: If voters like and respect a politician at a personal level, that bond—more often than not—will override whatever policy differences they may have with that politician.

McCain is a case study. His reputation was made eight years ago, when he happily claimed the maverick mantle and went to war with George W. Bush and the Republican establishment. It made him a hero to independent voters—finally, a politician who’s not afraid to call BS even on his own party—and a villain to conservatives. In truth, what both groups of voters were really responding to was a caricature. But the electorate rarely sees gray.

The degree to which that image remained intact became clear earlier this cycle, when McCain defined his campaign by his commitment to the Iraq war. He has ridiculed those who call for a withdrawal of troops, adamantly maintained that the preemptive invasion was warranted, loudly blocked every legislative attempt in the Senate to scale back the war and even suggested that a similar war with Iran might be in the cards if he’s elected president.

Logically, this record should infuriate the independent voters who adore Maverick McCain. It should also make him a hero to the right. And yet: The old caricature has prevailed. McCain only won his key early primary state victories thanks to support from antiwar independents and Republicans, while Republican voters who most favored the war lined up with Mitt Romney.

And that goes a long way toward explaining why the personally popular and respected Rice would be a considerable asset to a McCain-led ticket—even though it makes no logical sense.

On This Week, The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel scoffed at the mention of Rice as a VP prospect, dubbing her “the worst national security adviser in modern history.”

Vanden Heuvel and other highly engaged liberal partisans know Rice as the national security adviser who ignored considerable evidence to the contrary and assured Americans in 2002 and 2003 that Saddam Hussein possessed a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, and that the smoking gun proof of this might take the form of “a mushroom cloud” over the United States.

But at the moment, this is not what most Americans think of when they think of Rice, even as they’re telling pollsters that they don’t think the war was a good idea and that they don’t like the work the Bush administration has done. It’s the same with McCain: The same surveys that show voters declaring the war a mistake by a two-to-one margin also show McCain significantly outpolling both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama when it comes to the war and foreign policy.

If McCain were to pick Rice, he’d be sealing his intimate attachment to the war for the rest of the campaign. This should be political suicide. But because voters think so highly of him and of Rice, they might see something completely different—and appealing.

Not Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, who this afternoon told Media Mob that she had recently turned down Mr. Colbert's invitation to appear on his Jan. 7 show.

She said that she loved The Colbert Report but that she is "standing in solidarity with the striking writers."

"I think in this day and age, when you have these powerful media companies up against the writers, that you have to respect the strike," said Ms. vanden Heuvel. "There are large issues involved for the future of media. It's an issue this magazine has written a lot about and cared a lot about."

"The first centerfold The Nation ever did was a chart depicting these media companies," she continued. "So it seemed to me that the strike is an important fight against the power of conglomerat-ization, media consolidation, and Murdoch-ization."

According to Ms. vanden Heuvel, the show was looking for someone to talk about the role of labor today in America.

"I think Colbert is terrific," said Ms. vanden Heuvel. "We all miss it in different ways, but this strike has to be worked out before one goes back on."

Mr. Hayes, who has spent the last year contributing regularly to The Nation as a Puffin Fellow at the Nation Institute, will replace David Corn, whose departure for Mother Jones was announced a month ago. While technically a senior editor at In These Times, Mr. Hayes said The Nation has been his primary focus during the last 12 months, and that about 90 percent of his writing from that time has appeared in its pages.

According to an e-mail Mr. Hayes sent to subscribers of his Google Groups listserv, he "will focus more squarely on the political doings in the nation's capital" than he did as a freelancer, but that he hopes "to preserve some of the focus on movements, institutions, organizations and ideas that has been the through-line for much of [his] previous political writing."

Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel told Media Mob that she hired Mr. Hayes last week while the two of them sat in DC's Union Station.

"He has a great voice, he's a superb writer, he has a keen eye, and great intellectual sophistication," Ms. vanden Heuvel said. "I think [New Yorker political writer] Rick Hertzberg is eternally youthful, but I think Chris has the ability to be a young Rick Hertzberg."

Ms. vanden Heuvel said The Nation may also be adding an investigative editor to the DC bureau in the next few weeks.