Margaret Carlson is a columnist for the Daily Beast. A former Bloomberg View columnist, Margaret Carlson was TIME magazine’s first female columnist where she penned her popular column, Public Eye, for over a decade. As a former White House correspondent for TIME, Carlson covered four presidential elections. She appeared on CNN’s Capital Gang for 15 years.

Prior to joining TIME, Carlson was managing editor of The New Republic, Washington bureau chief for Esquire magazine, and editor of The Washington Weekly. Carlson spent a year after college working at the U.S. Department of Labor and three other agencies. She taught school in Watts, Los Angeles, before joining Nader’s Raiders. After graduating from law school, she was briefly a Federal Trade Commission lawyer under Michael Pertschuk. Carlson has won two National Headliner Awards as well as the Belva Ann Lockwood alumni award from George Washington University Law School. She serves on the boards of the German Marshall Fund and the Newseum. She has been a fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, a Poynter Fellow at Yale University and a journalist-in-residence at the University of Notre Dame.

Carlson earned her bachelor’s degree from Penn State University and a law degree from George Washington University Law School. She has covered every presidential election since 1988 and provides political commentary on various television networks. Carlson is the author of Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made it to the White House (Simon & Schuster, 2003), in which she expands on her writings about presidents, politics, morals, children, family and life lessons.