Daniel Wattenberg

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Daniel Eli Wattenberg is an American journalist and musician. He was born in 1959 and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. His father was the pundit Ben Wattenberg. He received his BA degree from Columbia University in 1983. He was a singer and songwriter with several somewhat successful punk rock bands, and made several dozen appearances at CBGB. His best-known band, the Casuals released an underground hit single in the summer of 1980: "Tokens of Love" backed with "(Don't) Ripple My Lake." The surrealistic yet danceable B-side was a pioneering attempt to fuse punk rock with hip hop, psychedelia, and funk. The A-side was a safe sex anthem written at the very beginnings of the AIDS epidemic: the title takes off on the fact that the New York City subway token of the time was exactly the same size as a rolled-up condom.

Wattenberg surprisingly retired from music in 1983 to join the US State Department. He was first assigned to the embassy in Paris before being called back to Foggy Bottom to serve as a speechwriter for Iran-Contra figure Elliott Abrams. After the scandal, he left public service to work as a neoconservative journalist. He joined the staff of the then obscure daily The Washington Times, and he became one of the founding staffers of its spinoff, Insight Magazine. In the early 1990s he moved on to the American Spectator where he collaborated with David Brock on a number of exposes of Bill and Hillary Clinton. He was indirectly responsible for the Paula Jones case which led to Bill Clinton's impeachment: he made a passing reference to a state employee named "Paula" (no last name given) with whom Bill Clinton had an affair. Paula Jones claimed that she was that "Paula." (Jones's particular story is not specifically backed by Wattenberg and Brock's articles.) Wattenberg is the original source of the much-repeated allegations that then-Governor Clinton used his state trooper bodyguards to help him find girls. He also coined two famous epithets about Hillary Clinton: "The Lady Macbeth of Little Rock" and "The Winnie Mandela of American politics" (which at the time was considered an insult by the majority of his readers.)

He is also famous for a story he didn't publish: in the early 1990s, he investigated rumors that Bill Clinton had fathered a "love child" (a story which has been frequently revived by Matt Drudge and others, and which inspired a major plot point in the novel and film Primary Colors.) He decided not to print the story for what now seems like a somewhat quaint reason: i.e., because he was unconvinced that the story was in fact true.

Wattenberg went on to work as a writer and editor for such magazines as The Weekly Standard and John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s George. He also collaborated with his father on a syndicated newspaper column. In the mid-2000s, he returned to the Washington Times to serve as its Arts Editor. He also began singing and writing songs again about the same time.

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