Unlikely? More likely because she was a lesbian.

If you read part of this Newsweek profile on Rachel Maddow, it's interesting that somebody with her background would ever have been called an "Unlikely" candidate for TV....more likely they never thought she would suceed due to being unwilling to hide the fact of her lesbianism.


The greatest media-created cliché about Maddow has been that her "meteoric rise" has been almost accidental, that the truck-driving, yard-clearing, erstwhile activist became an "unlikely" star once the MSNBC heads recognized her potential. That's clearly a fiction.
Her résumé is impressive: she studied public policy at Stanford before winning a Rhodes scholarship to undertake a Ph.D. in political science. While completing her thesis, Maddow worked odd jobs—unloading trucks, landscaping, stamping coffee packets—before entering a competition on local radio. She was offered a job that day. In 2004, she got her own show on Air America, which still airs nightly. Before long, the cable-TV networks anointed her as one of their favorite leftist pundits, and not long after that, MSNBC star Keith Olbermann pressured his bosses to give Maddow her own show. Maddow's partner, artist Susan Mikula, believes the "unlikely" label is just code for lesbian: "She goes from Stanford to Oxford to activism to radio, then TV? What's so unusual about that? Is it because she is a gay lady?"