Fueled by his father’s money and his wife’s ambition, Texas millionaire Roy Michael Huffington Jr. is trying to buy his way into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 1996, after brief stops in the House and the Senate. He hasn’t quite made it to the latter yet. That’s why the first-term California congressman, who moved to Santa Barbara from Texas only in 1991 and has almost no legislative record—he’s on his way to spending more money on a campaign than anyone ever has in the history of the Senate, perhaps $25 million, to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Dianne Feinstein. And that’s only one part of the Huffington story.

“If anyone thinks she hasn’t seen herself in the White House yet, then you don’t know Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington,” says Peter Matson, a former literary agent of the Greek-born, Cambridge-educated author. “Michael was searching for himself, and Arianna found him,” says a friend who knew them before they were married. “My illustration for them is ‘Driving Michael Huffington’: Arianna wearing a cap behind the wheel and Michael sitting in the backseat looking perfectly bewildered.”

Yet Huffington has already managed to win once with the help of his wife, who frequently spoke in his place and who has been dubbed “the sir Edmund Hillary of social climbers.” In 1992 he spent 5.2 million - $43 a vote – and gave many thousands more in donations to cultural and charitable institutions in his Republican district in a slash-and-burn campaign aimed first at turning out nine-term congressman Bob Lagomarsino and the at defeating his Democratic opponent. Now, he’s in the process of spending five times that on the Senate race against Feinstein, and rapidly depleting his $70 million share of the money from the sale of Huffco, the oil-and-gas company his father created, in 1990. And he’s doing it all on TV, where everything is scripted for him and where he doesn’t have to talk to the press or to voters.

“He’s a ...