- Pritzker Fellows
- Former Fellows
- Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes
New York Times National Correspondent
Biography
Jackie Calmes worked at The New York Times as a national correspondent and White House correspondent in its Washington bureau for more than eight years, from August 2008 through 2016, covering politics and economic policy through the Great Recession and its aftermath. She covered the White House for the first five years of the Obama administration. Before joining The Times, Ms. Calmes worked 18 years at The Wall Street Journal in its Washington Bureau, covering Congress and the Clinton and Bush administrations, often focusing on budget and tax legislation, and ending as the chief political correspondent for the 2006 and 2008 campaign cycles.
After reporting on the 2000 George W. Bush campaign and election recount, in 2001 she became editor of the Journal's "Politics and Policy" page and reporter-writer of the longtime front-page "Washington Wire" column. In 2005, having returned to reporting on the Bush White House and 2004 reelection campaign, Ms. Calmes was awarded the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency.
Ms. Calmes has appeared as a frequent analyst on PBS’s “Washington Week,” as well as on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” CNN, MSNBC and C-SPAN. She began her journalism career covering state politics, government and assorted goings-on in Texas, at the Abilene (Texas) Reporter-News and soon in Austin, for the capital bureau of Harte-Hanks Newspapers and then the Austin bureau of the Dallas Morning News. Moving to Washington, D.C., in 1984, she worked for the Congressional Quarterly until 1990 and for a year as congressional reporter for the Atlanta Constitution and Cox Newspapers Inc., and was hired by the Wall Street Journal in 1990.
A native of Ohio, Ms. Calmes earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Toledo and a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University. She has two daughters.
Seminars
“The Future of Budget & Tax Policy”
Jackie Calmes joins us for two weeks to examine economic policy and the impact of changes we might see under the new administration, with a focus on health care, globalization and trade, and tax.
Trump’s numbers do not add up: That’s the consensus of budget experts across the board. No realistic level of economic growth and spending cuts can offset the costs of the new president’s proposals for infrastructure investments, deep tax cuts, repeal of the Affordable Care Act (and its revenue-raisers) and some unspecified alternative for universal health-care coverage - particularly since Trump has declared the fast-growing entitlement programs, Medicare and Social Security, off limits to budget-cutters. To avoid spurring the already unsustainable growth of federal debt that’s due to baby-boomers’ aging, something will have to give.
Jackie Calmes will review the ups and (increasingly) downs of American journalism, and coverage of politics and policy in Washington and state capitals, from the vantage of a nearly 40-year career, including more than a quarter-century in the Washington bureaus of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Journalism, already under economic threat, now has a YUGE challenge covering the new, no-holds-barred president. How has the profession changed, and how might it change further? This will not be a one-way discussion. And the discussion leader wants to know: What draws someone to be a journalist today?