Listeners tuning in to the POTUS channel on SiriusXM at 9 a.m. Mondays through Fridays are greeted by the earworm refrain of arguably Stealers Wheel's most popular song: "Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. Here I am: Stuck in the Middle with You." It is a befitting song for "The Michael Smerconish Program," as the show's namesake often works issues from many angles in search of what lies at their center. And we're along for the ride with him. The 57-year-old Doylestown, Pa. native, who also hosts CNN's "Smerconish" on Saturdays at 9 a.m., has seen success in the political, legal, and media worlds – sometimes with those worlds overlapping. A Lehigh University grad who went on to earn his Juris Doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Smerconish spent his early years working in the GOP, including an appointment at age 29 in the George H.W. Bush administration to serve as the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Regional Administrator for Philadelphia Region III under Secretary Jack Kemp. But after three decades of supporting candidates to the right, Smerconish publicly broke ranks with Republicans and endorsed then-candidate Barack Obama in a 2,000-word essay for Salon in October 2008. Less than two years later in February 2010, Smerconish made the break official in a column, citing cable TV and talk radio's stronger push towards political polarization while he found most folks were, well, somewhere in the middle. A newspaper columnist for the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer, his columns are routinely reprinted in newspapers nationally. His most recent book, Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right: American Life in Columns, includes the most memorable of those columns – a hundred of them. The Daily Beast praised them, noting they "make for enjoyable reading and remind us that journalism properly practiced requires a good deal of nerve, honesty, and insight, along with openness to dialogue and the determination not to live in a bubble." These will be the subject of his Global Summit talk in Erie. Smerconish wrote six books prior to Clowns, five of which deal in politics and news. The other, his only novel to date, TALK, has had the television rights optioned by Warner Brothers. A man of many talents – and a proud Pennsylvanian – Smerconish lives in the Philadelphia suburbs where he and his wife, Lavinia, raised four children.
