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Richard Wolffe is an award-winning journalist and political analyst for MSNBC television. He covered the entire length of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign for Newsweek magazine, traveling with the candidate and his inner circle from his announcement through election day, 21 months later.His book about the Obama campaign, entitled Renegade: The Making of a President, will be published by Crown in June 2009 in the United States. It will be published by Virgin Books in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa; and Law Press in China.
Wolffe appears frequently on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann and Hardball. On NBC, he has featured as a political commentator on Meet The Press and TODAY. Prior to his exclusive contract with NBC, he appeared on CNN and Fox News, as well as international media including British, Canadian and Australian television.
He features prominently in the forthcoming HBO documentary on the Obama campaign, By the People, and played a leading role in the HBO documentary of the 2000 Bush campaign, Journeys with George.
In April 2009, he joined Public Strategies as Senior Strategist at the business advisory firm that serves some of the world’s largest corporations, non-profits and associations.
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 (about the president after Hurricane Katrina) and Weight of the World (the behind-the-scenes story of 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 chaotic 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 U.S. diplomatic correspondent in Washington D.C. In that capacity, he managed coverage of business and political affairs in the nation’s capital, and reported on U.S. foreign policy at the State Department and National Security Council.
He first started reporting on George W. Bush and his Texas team in 1999, at the start of the presidential campaign. He travelled with then-Governor Bush for more than a year, through the extraordinary election of 2000.
His earlier work for the Financial Times included extensive coverage of the Microsoft antitrust trial and the Clinton administration’s plans to break up the company. His work on regulatory and business issues in Washington included covering Treasury, the Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Wolffe spent eight years with the Financial Times including four years in the United Kingdom. His business work there included financial reporting in the City of London, investment management and financial advisory firms, and the manufacturing sector in the British heartland. In politics, he reported on the tumultuous period leading to Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997.
Wolffe is the co-author of The Victim’s Fortune, (HarperCollins, 2002), which reveals the behind-the-scenes deals that led to billions of dollars in compensation to the Nazis’ victims in the late 1990s. His reporting for the book covered major European companies such as Deutsche Bank, Daimler and Société Générale. It also encompassed government officials across Europe and the United States, and several high-profile class action lawyers.
His next book was in an entirely different field: he is co-author of a Spanish cookbook, Tapas: A Taste of Spain in America, published in 2005 by Clarkson Potter in the US and Planeta in Spain. He co-wrote a follow-up book Made in Spain, published by Clarkson Potter in 2008, and wrote a 26-part TV show of the same name for PBS television. He has also written for food magazines such as Food Arts and Food and Wine.
Born in Birmingham, England, Wolffe graduated from Oxford University with first-class honors in English and French in 1992. He lives with his wife and their three children in Washington, D.C.
Recent Articles by Richard Wolffe
Why Obama Won’t Talk Tough
Is President Obama going wobbly on Iran?
His former presidential rival John McCain declared on the Today show that “he should speak out that this is a corrupt, fraud, sham of an election.” Other conservatives and neo-cons have piled on with the condemnations of both the regime in Tehran and the one housed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Eric Cantor, the House Minority Whip, attacked Obama’s position as “a step backward for homegrown democracy in the Middle East.” Nile Gardiner, a Heritage Foundation commentator, who once worked as a researcher for Margaret Thatcher a decade after she left Downing Street, termed the president’s policy “cowardly, lily-livered and wrong.” Them’s fightin’ words—which is precisely what the Obama White House wants to avoid in dealing with the Iranian regime and a disputed foreign election. (Continue Reading)
Secret Rev. Wright Meeting
Of all the adversaries Barack Obama faced in his two-year quest for the White House, two stand out above all others: Hillary Clinton and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Both threatened to end his presidential dreams on their own. Both were big enough threats that Obama felt compelled to confront them face-to-face.
Yet the full story of those confrontations has never been told until now.
The exchanges were case studies in political psy-ops, Obama-style. He emerged with something less than success, and something more than failure. They were critical tests on his path to the presidency, and extraordinary examples of the personal strategies that are key to any president. (Continue Reading)
