Newsweek's Embedded Obama Campaign Reporter Joins Obama Administration

The revolving door between the media and Team Obama continues to rotate. Some journalists on the campaign trail were infatuated with Obama, and that’s certainly true of the Newsweek reporter who covered Obama in-depth (with the promise that nothing he learned would be revealed until after the election). Philip Klein on The American Spectator’s blog reported:

Daren Briscoe, a Newsweek correspondent who was embedded with Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, has taken a job with the Obama administration, according to an email sent to a listserv of his classmates at the Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

The email, written by Time reporter and fellow Columbia grad Jay Newton-Small, said Briscoe would be serving as deputy associate director of public affairs for the Office of National Drug Control Policy as of Monday.

"Despite his multiple basketball games with our commander-in-chief, he always brought a skeptical eye to his work and in conversations about the candidate," Newton-Small wrote the email.

Briscoe's campaign reporting helped provide the basis for Newsweek's book on the campaign, A Long Time Coming.

[UPDATE, complete list: Revolving Door from Journalism to Team Obama Now Up to a Dozen]

When the campaign was over, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham told the story of how Briscoe went silently into the Obama campaign bubble:

On the trail with Obama, Daren understood early on that, come what may, it was a historic campaign. "As Obama crisscrossed Iowa -- the linchpin for his then fanciful-sounding 'early state strategy' – in December of 2007," Daren says, "I found myself at an event, wondering what an all-white, elderly crowd of rural Iowa farmers would make of this skinny black guy – until I noticed how many faded pairs of overalls and worn straw hats already had OBAMA buttons pinned to them."

Then, in March 2008, when clips of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright crying "God damn America" were playing endlessly, Daren wondered whether Obama's candidacy would survive – until he watched Obama's subtle speech on race in Philadelphia. Daren's father, born and raised in the pre-civil-rights South, later told him: "That's the first time I've ever heard anybody explain how I feel." Daren's dad is 69 years old.

Briscoe will work for Obama "drug czar" Gil Kerlikowske, who was sworn in on June 19.