NBC's Primary Source for Election '08

He is accustomed to the role. During his boyhood in Miami, Todd recalls, his conservative father and a liberal cousin often got sloshed and argued about politics.

Todd was 16 when his dad died. Strapped for cash, Todd was accepted by George Washington University on a music scholarship -- he played the French horn -- and pursued a double major in politics.

Longtime friend Andrew Flagel, now George Mason University's dean of admissions, says Todd had phenomenal recall, "whether it had to do with every sports fact you could ever have at your fingertips or every congressional race. He was the Jimmy the Greek of politics. We'd be out at one of the bars in Georgetown or Foggy Bottom and he'd end up with 20 people around us, arguing about either politics or sports, and he's emceeing the discussion."

While in college, Todd worked for the 1992 presidential campaign of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and later started part time at the Hotline. He left school six credits short of graduation. "It's not the proudest thing on my résumé," he says.

The Hotline, with its exhaustive summaries of stories, polls and punditry, seemed like a perfect fit. "From the very first day," says founder Doug Bailey, "it was obvious this was a guy whose instincts were brilliant. And his work ethic was extraordinary." Bailey recalls telling Todd at an Orioles game a year later: "You're going to run this publication one day, so pay attention."

By 2001, Todd had indeed become editor in chief. A year later he married Kristian Denny, a Democratic consultant who served as communications director for Jim Webb's successful 2006 Senate campaign in Virginia. (Todd says he disclosed the connection on the air and tried to avoid discussing Virginia politics.)

Todd, whose role ranges from suggesting stories for correspondents to overseeing NBC's political blog First Read, excels at cutting through the fog. But on occasion he subscribes to conventional wisdom that turns out to be wrong. The day before the New Hampshire primary, he said on "Hardball" that Obama's "trajectory is still going up," that "everybody's thinking this is going to be a blowout," and that Clinton "is on the cusp of what could be the end of her national political career." Clinton, of course, stunned the pundits by winning New Hampshire.

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It is Tuesday, another primary day, and Todd's first stop is the "Today" show. At 7:13 a.m., he tells Meredith Vieira that the day's voting in Indiana and North Carolina won't have much impact on the delegate count, but "perception's everything." He offers a similar analysis on MSNBC at 7:52 and 9:02.

Matthews leads off "Hardball" at 5 p.m. by saying, "As our political director Chuck Todd put it, this is the last shopping day of the primary season." Todd's theory is that the real action is about to shift from the campaign trail to the superdelegates. On the show, he fields hypothetical questions about what would happen if Obama lost both states. "It would be one of those stomach punches," he says.

Shortly before 6, Todd is briefed on the networks' exit polls. Minutes later he is back in front of the green wall to rehearse with an interactive gizmo, mounted on a tall stand, that enables him to summon maps and graphics and write on them in virtual red ink. "I just tap it? Now, do I pop up Indiana or is Indiana popped up for me?"

At 6:08 Todd does it for real, getting down in the political weeds by rattling off the congressional districts deemed favorable to each candidate. An hour later, wearing a lavalier mike and earpiece that allows him to talk to the producers as he roams the halls, Todd gets into an argument about devoting the next segment to Indiana while ignoring Obama's apparent win in North Carolina. "That's why we get criticized," he says. (The segment is killed when the previous discussion runs long.)