Dana Timothy Milbank (born April 27, 1968) is a columnist for The Washington Post.
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He is a graduate of Yale University, where he was a member of Trumbull College, the Progressive Party of the Yale Political Union and the secret society Skull and Bones.[1][2] He is a graduate of Sanford H. Calhoun High School in Merrick, New York. He has been married since 1993 to Dona Lynn DePasquale.
Milbank covered the 2000 US Presidential election and the 2004 US Presidential election. He also covered US President George W. Bush's first term in office. After Bush won the 2000 election, Karl Rove asked the Washington Post not to assign Milbank to cover White House news.[3] In 2001, a pool report penned by Milbank which covered a Bush visit to the US Capitol generated controversy within conservative circles.[4] According to Milbank, the nickname given to him by the president is "not printable in a family publication."[5]
Milbank writes "Washington Sketch" for the Post, an observational column about political theater in the White House, Congress, and elsewhere in the capital. Before coming to the Post as a political writer in 2000, he covered the Clinton White House for The New Republic and Congress for The Wall Street Journal.
Milbank is the author of Smash Mouth: Two Years in the Gutter with Al Gore and George W. Bush—Notes from the 2000 Campaign Trail. A new book, Homo Politicus: The Strange and Scary Tribes that Run Our Government, was published by Random House in January 2008.[6]
Milbank was criticized for a July 30, 2008 article[7] in which, in part by using snippets of quotations, he portrayed Barack Obama as being presumptuous.[8][9] A few days later MSNBC's Keith Olbermann stated that Milbank would not be allowed back onto his show, which Milbank had appeared on since 2004, until Milbank submitted "a correction or an explanation." [10] However, Milbank had apparently already left Olbermann's show for another show on CNN.[11] Milbank stated that he has been dissatisfied since he was criticized by Olbermann's staff over making a positive comment about Charlie Black, a McCain senior advisor, and as a result had already been negotiating with CNN.[12]
Milbank and Chris Cillizza appeared in a series of humor videos called "Mouthpiece Theater" which appeared on the Washington Post's website. An outcry followed a video in which, during a discussion of the White House "Beer Summit", they chose new brands for a number of people, including "Mad Bitch Beer" for Hillary Clinton. Both men apologized for the video and the series was canceled.[13]
On October 5, 2010, Doubleday released Milbank's polemic biography of conservative pundit Glenn Beck: Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America,[14] which a review in Milbank's paper, the Washington Post said was a "droll, take-no-prisoners account of the nation's most audacious conspiracy-spinner."[15]