Mara Liasson
Mara Liasson is a national political correspondent for NPR. Her reports can be heard regularly on NPR's award-winning newsmagazine programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Liasson provides extensive coverage of politics and policy from Washington, DC 鈥� focusing on the White House and Congress 鈥� and also reports on political trends beyond the Beltway.
Each election year, Liasson provides key coverage of the candidates and issues in both presidential and congressional races. During her tenure she has covered seven presidential elections 鈥� in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016. Prior to her current assignment, Liasson was NPR's White House correspondent for all eight years of the Clinton administration. She has won the White House Correspondents' Association's Merriman Smith Award for daily news coverage in 1994, 1995, and again in 1997. From 1989-1992 Liasson was NPR's congressional correspondent.
Liasson joined NPR in 1985 as a general assignment reporter and newscaster. From September 1988 to June 1989 she took a leave of absence from NPR to attend Columbia University in New York as a recipient of a Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism.
Prior to joining NPR, Liasson was a freelance radio and television reporter in San Francisco. She was also managing editor and anchor of California Edition, a California Public Radio nightly news program, and a print journalist for The Vineyard Gazette in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.
Liasson is a graduate of Brown University where she earned a bachelor's degree in American history.
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After a horrendous October rollout, the ACA is viewed a little more favorably now. But the number of people who intensely oppose the law is 12 percentage points higher than those who strongly back it. -
The president's party is counting on sophisticated field operations to stave off defeat in November. But in the year's first test, a Florida special election, the effort fell short. -
Ukrainian interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk is visiting the White House Wednesday. The meeting comes days before a vote in Crimea over whether to secede from Ukraine.
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The Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of conservative activists, routinely attracts big names in the Republican party 鈥� and this year's no different. It starts Thursday.
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Cutting the national debt and deficit used to be the most divisive political debate in Washington. These days, not so much. Both parties have agreed to move on and focus on issues they largely agree on: income inequality and social mobility. But there's not much they can do without a sustainable budget. -
On Tuesday night, President Obama will lay out his priorities before Congress and, more importantly, the country at large. NPR's national political correspondent, Mara Liasson, speaks with Audie Cornish about what the president hopes to accomplish with this year's State of the Union.
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John Podesta, the newly named counselor to the president, is a second-term crisis management specialist who many Democrats hope will help the recently unsteady Obama White House get its act together. -
Fissures in the Republican Party have drawn a great deal of attention over the last year. But this week, the Democrats' economic disagreements came into full view. When it comes to Social Security, not all Democrats think expanding the program is a good idea. -
Several states are moving or looking to move to a new primary election system that could force members of Congress to pay more attention to general election voters than to their base voters on the right or left. -
Just a few weeks ago, pollster Bill McInturff characterized the high negative ratings for Congress and the president as "ripples that will take a long time to resolve." Now, with new polling that suggests even deeper voter frustration, he says the political climate is even worse than before.
