"If you look at where presidents come from, they're former governors or senators." -- Eleanor Clift
Eleanor Clift (born July 7, 1940) is an American political reporter, television pundit and author. She is currently a contributing editor for Newsweek magazine. Her column, "Capitol Letter" is posted each week on the Newsweek and MSNBC websites. She is a regular panelist on the nationally syndicated show The McLaughlin Group, which she has compared to "a televised food fight".She is also a political contributor for the Fox News Channel.
Clift is a Board Member at the IWMF (International Women's Media Foundation).
"At the unveiling at the White House of the presidential portrait, President Bush pointed out that Hillary Clinton was the first sitting Senator in history to have her portrait hanging in the White House.""Bush does not want to go down in history as the president who lost in Iraq. His strategy to the extent he has one is to hang tough and let whoever succeeds him take the fall.""Bush is good at stating the obviously untrue.""Hospice means end-of-life care. The admission ticket is a diagnosis from a doctor that you have six months or less to live.""If privacy ends where hypocrisy begins, Kitty Kelley's steamy expose is a contribution to contemporary history.""If there is a ground zero in the cultural wars, it is Missouri, a state where pro-life groups are strong and well organized and their agenda dominates local politics.""If you think of life and death on a continuum, finding the point where it tips is complicated. It cuts across all political lines and gets to the root of our humanity. It requires faith informed by years of intimacy that you're doing what's right for your loved one.""It's a complicated set of opinions that women bring to the voting booth.""Living in the fishbowl is hard enough without worrying about a Secret Service that can't keep mum.""Looking at female candidates today, other women are the hardest on them, especially older women who were brought up in a different culture.""Often, the disparities in the ways men and women are treated are subtle; there are not these clear barriers that you have to break down.""People want change but not too much change. Finding that balance is tricky for every politician.""Politics is so much about serendipity that we've got to have a bigger pool of women, so that when people drop out of the process, you've got others to turn to.""The list of women to potentially be on a major party ticket, in both parties, is embarrassingly short.""Today's young women don't really see inequities until they go out into the real world.""You get elected, often, if you're a woman, on the strength of the women's vote; then you get into office, and you have to adapt to an overwhelmingly male environment."
Clift was born Eleanor Roeloffs in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of immigrants from the island of Föhr in the North Sea. She grew up in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, where her parents ran a deli in Sunnyside. Clift was raised a Lutheran and attended Hofstra University and Hunter College. She began her career as a secretary at Newsweek, and is one of the first female reporters to earn an internship from the secretary pool. She began her broadcast career on The Diane Rehm Show on WAMU-FM, Washington, D.C., as a Friday week-in-review panelist. She became known to listeners for her good-natured acceptance of ribbing from other panelists and callers to the program.
During the Clinton Administration, she was jokingly referred to as Eleanor "Rodham" Clift or Eleanor "Rodham Clifton," because of her fierce defense of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton. Clift has made some memorable comments on The McLaughlin Group:
"The GAO will finally issue its report on the White House...the vandalizing of the White House in between the Clinton-Gore administration...Clinton and Bush administrations. (Laughter.) Well, it should have been the Gore administration." February 23, 2002.
"But I think what we're coming to grips with is the fact that we actually have a mercenary Army, and it doesn't have a nice ring to it. We call it 'volunteers', but we're basically paying people to serve their country. And if you're going to pay people and have a mercenary Army, you're going to have to pay the market rate. And so the bounties are going up...more money for tuition, higher enlistment bonuses...and I think it's appropriate." August 27, 2005. Newsweek Reporter Asked to Apologize for 'Mercenary Army' Comment - 08/30/2005
She has appeared in four movies. She played a talk show panel member in Rising Sun (1993), and appeared as herself in Dave (1993), Independence Day (1996) and Getting Away with Murder (1996). She was also recently portrayed by actress Mary Ann Burger in the 2009 film Watchmen.
In 2008, she wrote Two Weeks of Life: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Politics which intertwines the events of her own life and those of the nation concerning the Terri Schiavo case during a two-week period in March 2005. In it she examines the way people in the United States deal with death, publicly and personally.
Clift's first marriage was to William Brooks Clift, Jr. (1919-1986), the brother of the actor Montgomery Clift. They had three sons: Edward Montgomery, Woodbury Blair, and Robert Anderson. In September 1989, she married Tom Brazaitis, Washington columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. They remained together until his death of kidney cancer on 30 March 2005.
