Eleanor Clift

Eleanor Clift is a contributing editor for Newsweek magazine, reporting on the White House, presidential politics, and a variety of national issues.  Her column, “Capitol Letter,” is posted each week on Newsweek.com and MSNBC.com.  Clift is also a regular panelist on the nationally syndicated show, The McLaughlin Group, and a political analyst for the Fox News Network.  Playing herself as a member of  The McLaughlin Group, she has appeared in several films, including Independence Day, Murder at 1600 Pennsylvania, and Dave, as well as the CBS series Murphy Brown.

Eleanor Clift’s book Founding Sisters and the 19th Amendment (2003) tells the story of the long struggle for women to gain the right to vote.  The book accompanied the 2004 HBO movie Iron Jawed Angels, starring Hillary Swank and Anjelica Houston.

Clift and her late husband, Tom Brazaitis, who was a Washington columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, coauthored two books.  Madam President: Shattering the Last Glass Ceiling (2000) tracks the rise of women in politics and looks ahead to the day when there will be a woman president.  Publishers Weekly calls it “a sharp, insider’s view of the quest to elect a female U.S. president . . . melding the immediacy of a breaking news story with savvy investigative journalism.”  About their earlier book War Without Bloodshed: The Art of Politics (1996) , SNN news analyst Jeff Greenfield said, " . . . it unquestionably works as a road map through the byways of the Washington they don’t teach in civics classes.”

Clift's recently published book, Two Weeks of Life (2008), recounts her experience with the very private death of her husband and examines the public debate over Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman whose right to die was challenged by Congress and President Bush.

Formerly a deputy bureau chief and Newsweek’s White House correspondent, Clift continues to write about the White House, Congress, and the political scene.  She covered the Kerry campaign for Newsweek’s special election project, which is a behind-the-scenes account of the presidential race that was published immediately after the November 2004 election and expanded into a book. She was also a member of the magazine’s 2000 and 1992 election teams, and followed Bill Clinton’s campaign from the start. Eleanor Clift is currently assigned to the ’08 race for the magazine’s special election project.

In June 1992, Clift was named Deputy Washington Bureau Chief. According to Brill’s Content, a journalism review, Eleanor Clift if one of the most accurate predictors among the pundits on the political talk shows.