Columnist Robert Novak speaks in Providence yesterday before addressing financial planners.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig Kris Craig

PROVIDENCE — Up close, Robert Novak looks as if he walked out of the television screen: three-piece charcoal suit, white shirt, red tie, toothy smile, blunt talk — all leavened by disarming humor.

At 76, Novak, who has been a Washington reporter, columnist, television commentator and permanent presence for 50 years, says today’s Washington and political establishment is light years from 1957, when he started as an Associated Press reporter.

Politics was more genteel; senators, representatives and presidents could disagree without becoming sourly disagreeable. Reporters could do their jobs — and speak frankly to sources — without being hounded by FBI agents and dragged before grand juries.

“It is a bad time,” said Novak. Politics in Washington is increasingly nasty and President Bush’s administration is mired in a second-term funk, with a “dysfunctional” attorney general and a White House staff that is “comatose.”

“The White House is in the bunker,” said Novak. “The Democrats have been out in the wilderness for 12 years and they are in a very bad mood.”

Novak spoke last night at the Rhode Island Convention Center before several hundred members of the Rhode Island Society of Financial Service Professionals, a group of accountants, financial planners and insurance professionals.

The sharp-elbowed world of Washington politics has become rougher in recent years because the Democrats have become more of a liberal party and Republicans have become more conservative, Novak said.

“The partisanship is partly because of the realignment,” said Novak. “The New England Republicans, the Northeastern Republicans, have just about disappeared, as have the Southern conservative Democrats. You have a liberal party and conservative party.”

In an interview before his speech, Novak said that obviously the Iraq war has caused problems for the GOP, but the Bush administration’s policies there are not the only difficulty the Republicans faced in 2006.

“The Republicans had 12 years of control of Congress to do a lot of things … and they really didn’t do it,” said Novak.

“They really drank the Kool-Aid, they got hooked on spending, they got hooked on big government, they got hooked on their earmarks.”

On presidential politics, Novak said, the conventional thinking in Washington is that Mr. Bush and the GOP have made such a mess of things that Democrats are likely to prevail in the 2008 presidential election.

“The Democrats really have to blow it,” said Novak. “I think they are capable of it.”

Novak says he is skeptical of the chances of the Democratic front-runner, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton. “I don’t think she has to stumble. I just don’t think people like her. If you have Fred Thompson, say, against Hillary Clinton, I think that is a problem for her.

“She has never been tested by a good candidate,” said Novak, a reference to Clinton’s two victories in New York over lackluster opponents.

On the other side, Novak does not think the three leaders of the GOP presidential pack have an easy road to nomination. Novak said he does not believe that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Arizona Sen. John McCain or former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani have wide appeal to the Republican Party’s conservative base.

Which leaves Thompson, the former Tennessee senator and well-known actor — he plays District Attorney Arthur Branch on television’s Law and Order — Novak said.

While the cinematic Thompson seems an avuncular, unthreatening presence, Thompson has true conservative credentials, Novak said. “His demeanor doesn’t seem like a right-winger, but his voting record is conservative.”

Novak is known in Washington as the “Prince of Darkness,” a moniker given to him by the late John Lindsay, a Newsweek correspondent. “I see the glass as half-empty, rather than being half-full. I’ve never been a cheerleader.”

“Prince of Darkness,” Novak said, will be the title of his book about 50 years of reporting in the nation’s capital, which is due out in July.

Novak said he wished the “whole incident” concerning his involvement in publishing the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame didn’t happen, but he defended his actions in testifying before a grand jury investigating the leak of the story to him and other reporters.

“I didn’t feel I gave up anybody,” said Novak, referring to his grand jury testimony about his sources, who turned out to be Richard Armitage, a former State Department official, and Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s political adviser.

“In the first place, I paid most of my legal fees, [about $150,000, he estimates] myself,” said Novak. “The advice to me was if I went all the way to the Supreme Court, I’d probably go to jail and for what — I’d probably lose the case and hurt press freedoms.”

smackay@projo.com