TM Note: As the New Year opens, as I said weeks ago, my long and very busy days are directed towards a project, which I’ll talk about down the line some time. I’m juggling a lot that’s for sure, but it’s a great adventure, which is the whole point to life, really. Following your bliss isn’t easy and is filled with struggles and challenges along the way to manifesting your intentions, but it sure as hell beats the alternative. Stay tuned…
On the day I watch her tape her radio show, as is normally the case, Marsh’s on-air persona is very calm and reasonable. She speaks without notes, able to move skillfully from a detailed analysis of campaign polling to the war in Iraq to the day’s Maureen Dowd column on Obama — and her delivery is smooth: She pauses dramatically for effect, and she doesn’t scream. In these quieter moments, she is often at her most effective, offering clear-eyed analysis that is as smart as anything on CNN. [...] – The New Republic
Taylor Marsh is a writer, author and political analyst focusing on national politics, but also foreign policy, including women’s international issues. She’s reported from the White House, and on news events impacting the national scene and has been writing on the web since 1996. Marsh has been profiled in the profiled in the Washington Post (pdf version), The New Republic, featured in the LA Times, NewYorkTimes.com and many other new media and traditional news venues, including USA Today. She is a regular contributor on Huffington Post, her writing featured across the web, including on the right, reporting for Pajamas Media during the 2008 Democratic primary season. She’s been interviewed on CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English, and many other outlets, including radio. Taylor is based out of Washington D.C. You can also follow her on Twitter, (and Facebook), with her “TM-DC” podcasts available through ITunes. She graduated with a B.F.A. from Stephens College.
“One of the great blogs.” – Steve Clemons of The Washington Note.
In 2005, Marsh, a former Broadway performer, wrote, produced and directed “Weeping for J.F.K.,” a one woman political tour de force staged in Los Angeles that traced the intersection of politics, John F. Kennedy and her life, from the 1960s to the present. A dream built on over two decades of performance experience, starting from when she was a kid and coming true when Jerry Herman cast her after her very first audition that landed her on Broadway. In September 2002, after years doing radio interviews, Marsh launched her radio show in Las Vegas, but a larger market eluded her.
Photo by Robert Evans
Taylor was also “relationship consultant” and columnist for alt newsweekly LA Weekly, making her an expert on relationships, dating and marriage, who, at the time of this work, likely interviewed as many people as anyone with “Dr.” behind their name. Taylor’s curiosities evolved into investigative work of the sex trade business, prostitution and phone sex that included interviews with real desperate housewives, single, married and divorced women, religious of all stripes, and hundreds of men. She was the first political editor online when e-commerce hit and one of the few writers on the web writing about Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones and the hunting of Pres. Bill Clinton back in the late 1990s. The site made news from the front page of the Wall Street Journal, featured in USA Today, US News & World Report and beyond. Marsh’s editorial page, politics from the point of view of a woman, was the first of its kind at the time, offering political content like Hugh Hefner did in Playboy (covered in The New Republic profile), as she took on Ken Starr. She chronicled her wild ride and expertise in a book that was excerpted in Net.SeXXX: Investigating Sex, Pornography, and the Internet, by Dennis Waskul, a Utah professor who called Taylor’s book on the subject, “a great gutsy story about something that is normally written about from a distance.” It’s a favorite point of attack of Taylor’s detractors, but if Scott Brown can become a senator after a nude photo spread in Cosmo, a woman researching and writing about the “politics of sex” shouldn’t have to make excuses and Taylor does not. Her relentless pursuit of the story behind “politics of sex” has made her the expert on the subject of what happens when men and women in politics, but also the media, converge.
Taylor’s expertise on the “politics of sex” came in handy during the 2008 primary season when Taylor suddenly found herself going from outside onlooker to someone in the middle of the toughest partisan fight seen in decades. Her site became a major hub for Hillary supporters, when most of the web had turned hostile to Clinton. Hillary haters turned their wrath on Taylor, adding to a hate mail page that keeps growing.
Taylor did the pageant scene to pay for college, starting in her teens with Miss Teenage America, then eventually the Miss America Pageant. NOW picketed the year she was in the pageant, confronting Marsh one day in front of reporters as she came out of her hotel. One angry NOW supporter got in her face and asked: “How can you demean yourself like this?” Marsh simply replied: “You want to pay for my college tuition?” Her political passions began through watching her big brother’s political career, which included Missouri state senator, running for Congress, as well as working for John Ashcroft as assistant attorney general; with her brother also being called on by Sen. Orin Hatch during Ashcroft’s confirmation.
Taylor Marsh’s political analysis has been proven over the years, with her expertise on the “politics of sex” something no other analyst can offer. Marsh now concentrating on independent analysis that takes a page from Harry Truman: “I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell.” Coupled with her unflappability and sense of humor, Marsh is a different type of analyst. She is an expert on national politics, but also when national issues, male and females candidates, election cycles, and the media collide in the “politics of sex.”
