"If you can avoid talking on top of someone with whom you disagree, and with whom you're having a kind of fight, if you can avoid talking over them and shouting them down, if it's rapid fire, point, point, counterpoint, it can make for good TV," Varney says.
Varney's colleagues say his strong suit is actually the fact that he has a strong political point of view, and yet he can interview people of all political persuasions with a civility that isn't always the case with partisan newscasters.
"Some newscasters border on being insulting or demeaning, practically telling their guests to 'Shut up!' or saying, 'I don't want to talk to you anymore,'" Cavuto says. "I think all sides could be well served if they passionately adhered to their views but never got passionately nasty about them. Stuart is an example of believing in what you do without being a total ass."
He certainly doesn't hide his personal political beliefs. In a 2010 interview with Caroline Heldman, an associate professor of politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles, he spent six minutes disagreeing with her support of Obama's stimulus spending and the Democrats' tax policies, and in the end wound up asking her if she was a socialist:
"I always like to ask academics, who are on the left, this moral question: This is not an economics question. This is a moral question. Do you think it's moral to take more than half the income of successful people, anybody who's successful, do you think it's moral to take more than half their income in federal and state income taxes? Because that's what we're doing at the moment in America, and it's going to get worse," he said.
"I wish that were the case. That is the standard line-" she said.
"That is the case," Varney said.
"No, there are tax loopholes. Wealthy individuals-"
"No, there are not. Believe me, madam, I know all about tax loopholes, and you, madam, are wrong," he said. "Every extra dollar you make. Just pick a number, say $350,000 a year. Every extra dollar you make above that, you lose 50 cents. It goes to the government, in federal and state income taxes. That is a fact," Varney said.
"I wish that that happened. I wish there weren't tax loopholes that enabled wealthy individuals-"