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Michael A. Smerconish (born March 15, 1962) is an American radio host and television presenter, newspaper columnist, author, and lawyer. He broadcasts ''The Michael Smerconish Program'' weekdays at 9:00 a.m. ET on SiriusXM's POTUS Channel (124), and hosts the CNN program ''Smerconish'' at 9:00 a.m. ET on Saturdays. He is a Sunday newspaper columnist for ''The Philadelphia Inquirer''. Smerconish has authored six books: five non-fiction works and one novel. He is also of counsel to the Philadelphia law firm of Kline & Specter. ==Politics== Despite being raised in a Republican household, and while in his early teens, Smerconish began to correspond with the (then) Democratic Mayor of Philadelphia, Frank L. Rizzo. Eventually the two would meet and establish a close relationship. But Smerconish’s start in politics came in the spring of 1980 when his father competed unsuccessfully in a Republican primary for the Pennsylvania state legislature. Smerconish worked tirelessly in his father’s campaign during his own senior year in high school, during which he registered to vote for the first time. Despite his father’s election loss, Smerconish was smitten with GOP politics, having met both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush during the build-up to the Pennsylvania Primary. In 1980, Smerconish founded Lehigh University Youth for Reagan/Bush. While a full-time student at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, he ran for the Pennsylvania state legislature, losing the Republican Primary by 419 votes. After losing his primary, Smerconish continued at Penn Law, while working nearly full-time running political campaigns. In 1986, he was responsible for the City of Philadelphia in Senator Arlen Specter’s re-election win, and in 1987, Smerconish served as Rizzo’s Political Director in Rizzo’s losing (Republican) bid to re-take City Hall. After graduating from Penn Law, he opened up a title insurance agency with his brother Wally, before being appointed, at age 29, by the administration of President George H.W. Bush to serve as the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Regional Administrator for Philadelphia Region III (consisting of Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia) under Secretary Jack Kemp. After supporting only Republican presidential candidates for three decades, Smerconish publicly broke with the GOP and endorsed Barack Obama for president on October 19, 2008. In a 2,000 word essay for ''Salon'' titled "(Why this lifelong Republican may vote for Obama )," citing the Republican Party's failure to capture Osama bin Laden after seven years of war, he wrote, "All of this drives me bat-shit, and it just might drive me into the Obama camp. That’d be quite a departure." He has urged the Republican Party to pursue "moderation on social issues in order to advance a suburban agenda for the GOP." Writing a 2010 op-ed for ''The Washington Post'' titled "(On cable TV and talk radio, a push toward polarization )," Smerconish said, "Buying gas or groceries or attending back-to-school nights, I speak to people for whom the issues are a mixed bag; they are liberal on some, conservative on others, middle of the road on the rest. But politicians don't take their cues from those people. No, politicians emulate the world of punditry." On February 21, 2010, he announced in a newspaper column that he had left the Republican Party. Discussing Smerconish's (move to the middle ), Manuel Roig-Franzia of ''The Washington Post'' wrote, "It may be conventional wisdom that the only way to truly succeed in the world of talk is to occupy one of the poles. But Smerconish is betting his career that there’s a great untapped center." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Michael Smerconish」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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