Dana Milbank | |
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| Born | Dana Timothy Milbank April 27, 1968 |
| Education | Yale University (BA) |
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Dana Timothy Milbank (born April 27, 1968) [1] [2] is an American author and columnist for The Washington Post . He has written books about Al Gore, George W. Bush, Glenn Beck, American politics, and the Republican Party. He has appeared as a pundit on various shows.
Milbank was born to a Jewish family, [3] the son of Ann C. and Mark A. Milbank. [3] [4] He is a graduate of Yale University, where he was a member of Trumbull College, the Progressive Party of the Yale Political Union and the secret society Skull and Bones. [5] [6] He is a graduate of Sanford H. Calhoun High School in Merrick, New York.
Milbank covered the 2000 and the 2004 presidential elections. He also covered President George W. Bush's first term in office. After Bush won the 2000 election, Karl Rove asked The Washington Post not to assign Milbank to cover White House news. [7] In 2001, a pool report penned by Milbank which covered a Bush visit to the U.S. Capitol generated controversy within conservative circles. [8] According to Milbank, the nickname given to him by the president is "not printable in a family publication." [9]
Milbank writes "Washington Sketch" for the Post, an observational column about political theater in the White House, Congress, and elsewhere in the capital. Before coming to the Post as a political writer in 2000, he covered the Clinton White House for The New Republic and Congress for The Wall Street Journal .
Milbank was criticized for a July 30, 2008 article [10] in which, in part by using snippets of quotations, he portrayed Barack Obama as being presumptuous. [11] [12] A few days later MSNBC's Keith Olbermann stated that Milbank would not be allowed back onto his show, which Milbank had appeared on since 2004, until Milbank submitted "a correction or an explanation." [13] However, Milbank had apparently already left Olbermann's show for another show on CNN. [14] Milbank stated that he has been dissatisfied since he was criticized by Olbermann's staff over making a positive comment about Charlie Black, a John McCain senior advisor, and as a result had already been negotiating with CNN. [15]
Milbank and Chris Cillizza appeared in a series of humor videos called "Mouthpiece Theater" which appeared on The Washington Post's website. An outcry followed a video in which, during a discussion of the White House "Beer Summit", they chose new brands for a number of people, including "Mad Bitch Beer" for Hillary Clinton. Both men apologized for the video and the series was canceled. [16]
In a December 4, 2021 Op-ed, Milbank wrote that overall US media sentiment for President Joe Biden is as bad as, if not worse than, it was for then-President Donald Trump. He used data from the analytics company Forge.ai to mine through more than 200,000 articles from 65 different news sources to create a "sentiment analysis" of pro or con coverage. The comparison was done of the first 11 months of the Trump administration versus the same timeframe of the Biden term. His analysis showed that Biden had had mainly positive coverage for the first three months of the year, but the press covered Biden more harshly than Trump in the previous four months. [17] Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight , questioned Milbank's conclusion. [18]
In 1993, Milbank married Donna Lynn DePasquale in an interfaith Jewish and Roman Catholic ceremony. [4] After that marriage ended in divorce, in 2017 he married Anna Greenberg, daughter of Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and stepdaughter of Democratic Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (CT). [19]
Milbank is the author of Smash Mouth: Two Years in the Gutter with Al Gore and George W. Bush—Notes from the 2000 Campaign Trail.
Homo Politicus: The Strange and Scary Tribes that Run Our Government was published by Random House in January 2008. [20]
In 2010, Doubleday released Milbank's polemic biography of conservative pundit Glenn Beck: Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America, [21] which a review in Milbank's paper, The Washington Post, said was a "droll, take-no-prisoners account of the nation's most audacious conspiracy-spinner." [22]
In 2022, Milbank authored The Destructionists: The 25-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party. [23]
Milbank has stated that his policy on United States presidential elections is to vote for the best candidate who is not on the ballot. He voted for John McCain in 2000, Chuck Hagel in 2004, and Michael Bloomberg in 2008. He explained that his approach allows him to "go through the exercise of who would be a good president" while avoiding committing to one candidate or another in the race. [24]
Greg Marx, associate editor of the Columbia Journalism Review , describes Milbank as "extravagantly contrarian". [25] New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote of "Milbank's insistence on characterizing political debate as consisting of two unreasonable poles, and himself as a truth-teller caught in the middle — a posture so habitual and inflexible that it has become an ideology". [25]
Milbank has criticized the growth of the White House Correspondents' Dinner, writing in 2011 that the event "was a minor annoyance for years, when it was a 'nerd prom' for journalists and a few minor celebrities. But, as with so much else in this town, the event has spun out of control. Now, awash in lobbyist and corporate money, it is another display of Washington's excesses." [26] [27]
John Sidney McCain III was an American politician and United States Navy officer who served as a U.S. senator from Arizona from 1987 until his death in 2018. He previously served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and was the Republican Party's nominee in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.
A Reagan Democrat is a traditionally Democratic voter in the United States, referring to working class residents who supported Republican presidential candidates Ronald Reagan in the 1980 and/or the 1984 presidential elections, and/or George H. W. Bush during the 1988 presidential election. The term Reagan Democrat remains part of the lexicon in American political jargon because of Reagan's continued widespread popularity among a large segment of the electorate.
Keith Theodore Olbermann is an American sports and political commentator and writer. Olbermann spent the first 20 years of his career in sports journalism. He was a sports correspondent for CNN and for local TV and radio stations in the 1980s, winning the Best Sportscaster award from the California Associated Press three times. He co-hosted ESPN's SportsCenter from 1992 to 1997. From 1998 to 2001, he was a producer and anchor for Fox Sports Net and a host for Fox Sports' coverage of Major League Baseball.
John Wesley Dean III is a disbarred American attorney who served as White House Counsel for U.S. President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973. Dean is known for his role in the cover-up of the Watergate scandal and his subsequent testimony to Congress as a witness. His guilty plea to a single felony in exchange for becoming a key witness for the prosecution ultimately resulted in a reduced sentence, which he served at Fort Holabird outside Baltimore, Maryland. After his plea, he was disbarred.
Byron York is an American conservative correspondent, pundit, columnist, and author.
David Michael Gregory is an American television personality and the former host of NBC News' Sunday morning talk show Meet the Press. Gregory has served as a CNN political analyst since 2016.
Elisabeth Bumiller is an American author and journalist who is the Washington bureau chief for The New York Times.
Mark Evan Halperin is an American journalist, television cable host, political commentator and founder of the interactive media platform 2WAY. Halperin previously had worked as the political director for ABC News, where he also served as the editor of the Washington, D.C., newsletter The Note. In 2010, Halperin joined MSNBC, becoming the senior political analyst and a contributor. Along with John Heilemann, Halperin served as co-managing editor of Bloomberg Politics. Halperin and Heilemann co-wrote Game Change and Double Down: Game Change 2012, were co-hosts of MSNBC and Bloomberg's With All Due Respect, and produced and co-starred with Mark McKinnon in Showtime's The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth, which followed the presidential candidates behind the scenes of their campaigns in the 2016 United States Presidential Election.
John Bellinger Bellinger III is an American lawyer who served as the Legal Adviser for the U.S. Department of State and the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration. He is now a partner at the Washington, D.C. law firm Arnold & Porter, and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) is an organization of journalists who cover the White House and the president of the United States. The WHCA was founded on February 25, 1914, by journalists in response to an unfounded rumor that a United States congressional committee would select which journalists could attend press conferences of President Woodrow Wilson.
Counselor to the President is a title used by high-ranking political advisors to the president of the United States and senior members of the White House Office.
Jay Carney is an American public relations officer, political advisor, and journalist who served as the United States' White House Press Secretary from 2011 to 2014, and Amazon's Senior Vice President of Global Corporate Affairs from 2015 to 2022. Since 2022, he has been Global Head of Policy and Communications at Airbnb.
Peter Eleftherios Baker is an American journalist and author. He is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times and a political analyst for MSNBC, and was previously a reporter for The Washington Post for 20 years. Baker has covered five presidencies, from Bill Clinton through Joe Biden.
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Glenn Kessler is an American editor and writer who has written "The Fact Checker" feature for The Washington Post since 2011.
Cover your ass, abbreviated CYA, is an activity done by individuals to protect themselves from possible subsequent criticism, legal penalties, or other repercussions, usually in a work-related or bureaucratic context. In one sense, it may be rightful steps to protect oneself properly while in a difficult situation, such as what steps to take to protect oneself after being fired. But, in a different sense, according to The New York Times' language expert William Safire, it describes "the bureaucratic technique of averting future accusations of policy error or wrongdoing by deflecting responsibility in advance". It often involves diffusing responsibility for one's actions as a form of insurance against possible future negative repercussions. It can denote a type of institutional risk-averse mentality which works against accountability and responsibility, often characterized by excessive paperwork and documentation, which can be harmful to the institution's overall effectiveness. The activity, sometimes seen as instinctive, is generally unnecessary towards accomplishing the goals of the organization, but helpful to protect a particular individual's career within it, and it can be seen as a type of institutional corruption working against individual initiative.
Steven J. Ricchetti is an American political aide serving as a Counselor to the President under President Joe Biden. He was the chairman of Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign. Ricchetti previously served as Chief of Staff to Vice President Biden during the Obama administration and Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations under President Bill Clinton. In between stints in Democratic administrations, Ricchetti has worked as a lobbyist.
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This bibliography of Joe Biden is a chronological list of written and published works, by and about Joe Biden. In addition to works authored by Biden, the titles listed here are limited to notable non-fiction books about Biden or his presidency, published by well-known authors, journalists, and scholars. Tertiary sources, satire, and self-published books are excluded.
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