As the presidential primaries dragged to a close, Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that there was at least one winner, Chuck Todd of NBC News and MSNBC.
Todd, the networks’ political director, was the numbers geek in residence who could put the early returns in perspective just as he could translate the arcane rules of a political caucus into English.
“For political junkies, Todd has become all but inescapable,” wrote Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post in May. “When he isn’t shuttling between studios, he is being invoked as an authority by one anchor or another. After a career out of the limelight, the genial 36-year-old is the campaign season’s most improbable TV star.”
And yesterday in The New York Times, Alessandra Stanley echoed Kurtz, calling Todd “MSNBC’s most understated star, a master of exit polls, electoral maps and delegate counts.”
Todd’s ascendancy is surprising for many reasons.
For starters, he’s only been at NBC since March of last year.
It was then that the late Tim Russert, the head of the network’s Washington bureau, hired Todd away from The Hotline, a politically neutral daily news service owned by the National Journal.
In some ways, it seemed like a predictable hire, as Todd was known as a person with almost encyclopedic knowledge of politics and voting patterns.
But he had limited on-air experience. And given his goatee, mustache and blow-dry-resistant hair, no one would confuse Todd for a typical television reporter.
Turns out that Russert knew exactly what was needed this time around.
The endless Democratic primary season was complicated to the point of baffling. Someone was needed to explain the way caucuses work, the way a super delegate is chosen, the way donors comply with or avoid campaign-financing rules.
“The secret to (Todd’s) success is he understands politics and can explain it,” Russert told Kurtz a month before his death.
A native of Florida, Todd left George Washington University six credits short of graduation. (”It’s not the proudest thing on my resume,” he told Kurtz.)
He started at the The Hotline in 1992, beginning by covering congressional races.
“Nobody wanted to cover those in ‘92,” Todd told Aaron Barnhart of The Kansas City Star. “But it’s the local crime beat of politics. You understand how congressional races are going, and everything from there is easier.”
Todd became editor-in-chief at The Hotline in 2001. He’s married to Kristian Denny Todd, who has worked on the campaigns of several Democrats, most recently that of Jim Webb in the 2006 race for senator in Virginia.
Todd is sometimes included in the short list of candidates to take over Russert’s job as the permanent host of Meet the Press.
He has the political knowledge to do the job, analysts say. But his lack of experience covering non-political issues may rule him out of the job, they add.
Regardless, Todd already has a kind of cult following with at least two websites put together by his fans.
The site Chuck Todd Facts lives up to its name, listing hundreds of facts (most tongue-in-cheek) about Todd. (Fact: Al Gore invented the Internet. Chuck Todd invented Al Gore.)
The site Viva Chuck Todd bills itself as “an online salute to the smartest guy on television who makes sense of the senseless.”
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1 Comments
#1. Katherine 07.01.2008
Viva Chuck Todd and ChuckTodd08.com are hilarious and my new must-read morning destination.
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