I think everyone probably has the same reaction upon meeting Molly Ivins for the first time--"wow, she really is tall." She also really is as funny and as down-to-earth as her columns would suggest.

After a week tracking her Random House publicist down (who for some reason kept confusing "Molly Ivins" and "Maya Angelou"), I was prepared for an interview conducted with a secretary in the room and a security guard outside the door. I should have known better. This, after all, was the woman fired from the New York Times for describing a community chicken-killing festival as "a gang-pluck."

Ivins answered her own hotel phone (if she has a publicist travelling with her, he or she was nowhere in sight) and took off her shoes as soon as she sat down. The one thing surprising about Ivins is her voice. Her columns shout; she speaks so softly that the tape recorder could barely pick up her voice:

LES: As your work has become syndicated in the last few years, you have in some ways become sort of the imparter of Texas news to the world. The comparison that comes most easily to mind is the early work of Mike Royko, who performed much the same service for Chicago.

MI: For years, syndicates would call me and say: "if you'd just move to Washington, we could get you nationally syndicated."

I'd tell them: "I don't want to move to Washington. And if Royko can do it out of Chicago why I can't do it out of Texas?"

LES: Do you think knowing you're writing for a national audience has influenced or changed the way you write about Texas?

MI: I do three columns a week for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and I write for Fort Worth very specifically. I think I'm supposed to try and do one non-Texas column a week but I kind of never pay any attention to that.

And no, I don't think it's changed the way I write about Texas. I've been writing for Texas, about Texas for Texas, about Texas politics for a long time.

LES: Do you ever get reactions from friends who otherwise agree with you but worry about how you're making Texas look?

MI: Oh yes, the "making us look like fools problem." I'm a journalist, I'm not in public relations, I'm not an ambassador, I'm not supposed to make Texas look good to the rest of the world, I'm supposed to talk about what's going on.

LES: At the Wordsworth reading in Cambridge you spoke about how Rush Limbaugh has turned into sort of a cult figure for many of his listeners. Leaving the cult aspect aside, he does have the sort of humorous maverick style that appeals to many young people.

MI: I don't think that Rush Limbaugh is the equivalent of say, Mort Sahl. And again, it's because of who his targets are. Yes, it's identifiably satire, but the point I was trying to make last night is that when you aim satire at powerless groups it is really not only cruel, it's pathetically vulgar.

I suppose Mr. Limbaugh thinks that comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted has the charm of novelty, but frankly, it seems to me that a great deal of the American media already does that.

LES: You talk about Clinton quite a lot in your this book and in more recent columns. What about Al Gore? Is his being Vice-President going to hurt his profile or help it?