Richard Wolffe
Richard L. Wolffe (born 17 September 1968) is a British-American journalist, MSNBC commentator, and author of the Barack Obama books Renegade: The Making of a President (Crown, June 2009) and Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House (Crown, November 2010). Richard Wolffe is a US columnist for The Guardian. He was most recently vice-president and executive editor of MSNBC.com. Early life and journalism career Wolffe was born to an English father and a Moroccan mother in Birmingham, England, where he attended the fee-paying independent school, King Edward's School, Birmingham. He is Jewish. He is a 1992 graduate of Oxford University, achieving first-class honours, in English and French literature. He took the Westminster Press diploma in journalism, starting with the pre-entry course at Hastings in autumn 1992 while a trainee reporter with the Brighton Argus, and moved to the Financial Times and thereafter Newsweek. Wolffe covered the entire length of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign for Newsweek magazine, traveling with the candidate and his inner circle from his announcement through election day, 21 months later. He is a political analyst on MSNBC, having appeared frequently on Countdown with Keith Olbermann and Hardball with Chris Matthews. On NBC, he was featured as a political commentator on Meet The Press and TODAY. He features prominently in the forthcoming HBO documentary on the Obama campaign, and played a leading role in the HBO documentary of the 2000 Bush campaign, Journeys with George. He has also appeared on CNN and Fox News, as well as international media including British, Canadian and Australian television. As Newsweek'''s senior White House correspondent, his cover stories included "What He Believes" (on Obama's faith), "Black & White" (about Obama and racial politics), "Bush in the Bubble" (after Hurricane Katrina), and "Weight of the World" (how Bush handled the Lebanon War). Wolffe joined Newsweek in November 2002 as diplomatic correspondent, covering foreign policy and international affairs. In the 2004 presidential election, he covered the Howard Dean campaign before switching to John Kerry. Before Newsweek, Wolffe was a senior journalist at the Financial Times, serving as its deputy bureau chief and US diplomatic correspondent in Washington. He reported on US foreign policy, covered the Microsoft antitrust trial, as well as regulatory and business issues at the US Department of the Treasury, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. In April 2009, he joined Public Strategies, Inc. — a corporate-strategies firm run by Dan Bartlett, former director of White House communications under George W. Bush — as senior strategist. In July 2009, Wolffe guest-hosted a few episodes of Countdown with Keith Olbermann and came under fire from liberal bloggers and writers because of that position. "Having Richard Wolffe host an MSNBC program — or serving as an almost daily 'political analyst' — is exactly tantamount to MSNBC's just turning over an hour every night to a corporate lobbyist," wrote Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald. Olbermann apologised, claiming he was caught "flat-footed" and announcing that Wolffe would not appear