Aloha and mamaste everyone and welcome to In Politics and Culture for Odyssey and Puck

coming at you every Wednesday and Friday with fresh topical

candy conversations with the people who roam the corridors of power and

influence in America in culture, tech, business, sports, entertainment, and of course, our bread and butter around here,

that would be politics.

And today, with the Democratic Convention set to kick off on Monday in Chicago, we have with

us a living legend in the rarefied realm of party

strategists and sages. Mr. Douglas, Brian Sosnick. Born in 1956, raised in Winston

Salem, North Carolina and school 90 miles away at in College running his first campaign in 1982 for a self-described angry young man

named Bob Carr in Michigan's sixth congressional district and then serving his

car as chief of staff on Capitol Hill. A little more than a decade later, after rising to

become Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd's Chief of Staff, Sosnik signed on as

Bill Clinton's political director in the White House in 1995. as Clinton was facing an uphill climb for re-election after a calamitous

first two years in office which led to Republicans taking control of the

House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years.

With Sosnik's help, Clinton not only won in 1996, but he beat Bob Dole on a landslide,

thus cementing Doug's reputation as a political savant.

In the years that followed, Sosnick advised dozens of senators and governors,

including John Carey in his 2004 race against George W Bush,

Mark Warner, Virginia Governor, and now Senator, has he considered

running for president in 2008, as well as working at the Brunswick Group in Washington,

D.C., advising big-time non-political clients from the NBA and the MPAA and CNBC to the Rockefeller

...