Sirotablog

DAVID SIROTA is a political journalist, activist, columnist and New York Times bestselling author living in Denver, Colorado. His weekly, nationally syndicated column now appears in newspapers with a combined circulation of more than 1.3 million readers. These include, among others, The Denver Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Idaho Statesman, The Everett Herald, and the Idaho Falls Post Register.

Sirota is widely known for his tenacious focus on working class economic issues that are often ignored by America’s political elites. As Newsweek wrote in its 2003 profile of him, Sirota is “intense, driven, even obsessive [as he] fills the gap left by a timid Democratic establishment.” The American Prospect in 2006 called Sirota “the kind of pundit you’d like to have on your side in a knife fight and wouldn’t want to cross in a dark alley.” And syndicated columnist Molly Ivins said in 2007 that “Sirota is a new-generation populist who instinctively understands that the only real questions are ‘Who’s getting screwed?’ and ‘Who’s doing the screwing?’”

Sirota began his political career as a fundraiser on Joe Hoeffel’s (D) first successful run for Congress – a run in which Hoeffel defeated a Republican incumbent in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, which is one of America’s most evenly-divided congressional districts. Soon after, Sirota moved to Washington where he became the press secretary to Vermont U.S. Rep. Bernard Sanders, the longest-serving independent in congressional history. In 2000, Sirota took a leave of absence from Sanders’ office to serve as a press aide to Brian Schweitzer (D), a farmer and first-time candidate who came within 4 percentage points of defeating Montana’s second-term U.S. Senator, Conrad Burns (R). Sirota then returned to Washington to serve as the chief spokesman for Democrats on the U.S. House Appropriations Committee – the panel that oversees all federal discretionary spending.

Moving off Capitol Hill in 2003, Sirota accepted a position as one of the first employees of the Center for American Progress (CAP) – a national progressive think tank headed by former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta. As CAP’s Director of Strategic Communications, Sirota created the organization’s main daily publication, The Progress Report, which the National Review called “the most aggressive, most energetic opposition research in politics.” Sirota was also the principal author of Moveon.org’s Misleader (www.misleader.org), a daily publication that had 200,000 subscribers in the lead up to the 2004 presidential election. During the fall of 2004, Sirota returned to Montana to serve as a senior strategist to Brian Schweitzer in his successful run for governor. Schweitzer became the first Democrat elected to the governorship of Montana in 16 years.

Now living in Denver, Sirota recently completed his second book for Random House’s Crown Publishers. The book is entitled “The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington.” It is due out in the Spring of 2008. Sirota’s first book, which was a New York Times bestseller, is entitled Hostile Takeover. It examines how political corruption has resulted in public policies that economically squeeze America’s middle class.

Sirota is currently a senior editor at In These Times magazine. He also contributes regularly to The Nation and the American Prospect. Sirota is the full-time blogger for Working Assets, and a twice-weekly guest on The Al Franken Show. Over his career, his work has been published in, among others, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Hartford Courant, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Charlotte Observer, Knight Ridder Newspapers and The Washington Monthly (to see all of his work, go to www.davidsirota.com). He has been quoted in hundreds of newspaper stories, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press. He has also been a guest on, among others, CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, PBS’s Now with David Brancaccio and National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation. He has gone head-to-head in televised debates with right-wing icons like author Ann Coulter, ABC News “reporter” John Stossel and Wall Street Journal editorialist John Fund.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Sirota grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs. He attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where he also double-majored in political science. He first became involved in politics when, as a senior, he took a semester off to be the research director for an Illinois state senator running in the Democratic primary in Chicago’s north side congressional district.