I'm Carly Zaken. I'm Danielle Weisberg. Welcome to Skim from the couch.

This podcast is where we go deep on career advice from women who have lived it.

From the good stuff like hiring and growing a team.

To the rough stuff like hiring and growing a team to the rough stuff like negotiating

your salary and giving or getting hard feedback. We started the skim from a couch

so what better place to talk it all out than where it began on a couch.

Today, Elise Jordan joins me for our election special of Skimmed From the Couch, where we are taking a look at careers in politics.

As a veteran of the George W Bush White House, she's worked as a speechwriter and an advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

She was also a communications director for the National Security Council.

She's now a political analyst for MS NBC and NBC News.

Elise, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Welcome to Skim from the couch.

You know, there's nothing to talk about regarding politics,

so it will be a very boring show. Thanks so much for having me.

So I'm thrilled to have you here.

We'll start off the way we do all of these, which is time for you to skim your resume.

You know, I look back and I can't believe sometimes how old I've gotten so quickly and going

back to entering the workforce officially right after college around 2004 and I had

always been interested in journalism I had at my high school, I started my high school newspaper and then I went to Yale and I worked

at the Yale Daily News and I worked summers at a small town Mississippi newspaper and as a researcher on the author Steve Brill's book about the aftermath of 9-11.

So I knew I wanted to do something with journalism and preferably policy and so then when I graduated

my former editor at the Yale Daily News had gotten a job in the White House Office of Speech

...