Capital Gang

Overview

Capital Gang was a weekly political talk show on CNN. It aired on Saturday evenings at 7 p.m. ET. The original panel was Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak, Al Hunt, and Mark Shields. Mona Charen and Margaret Warner joined the panel in 1992, when Buchanan left the show to run for president in 1992. In 1993, Warner left the program to join PBS and was replaced by Margaret Carlson, and Kate O'Beirne replaced Charen when she moved to Capital Gang Sunday in 1995. Typically four of the commentators were featured along with a prominent public official from either party. Buchanan, O'Beirne, Charen and Novak were the conservative panelists, while Shields, Hunt, Warner and Carlson were the liberal commentators. The show debuted in the fall of 1988 and ran until CNN cancelled it in 2005. Capital Gang Sunday was hosted by James Glassman in the mid-1990s. It featured panelists Juan Williams, Howard Fineman, Ruth Conniff, James Warren, and Mona Charen. The show did not feature any guests and was more cerebral than combative, in contrast to the Saturday version. In 1998, it, too, was canceled, along with CNN's Sunday edition of Crossfire. The "Capital Gang" panellists appeared together again on NBC's Meet the Press with Tim Russert on February 17, 2008. With the Democratic nomination race still very much undecided, and the role of the so-called "superdelegates" in question, Hunt, Carlson, Shields, Novak and O'Beirne gathered to discuss the issues.