Ari Melber is an attorney, television commentator and a correspondent for The Nation magazine, the oldest political weekly in America.

During the 2008 presidential election, Melber traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. In 2010, Melber authored a 74-page special report for techPresident analyzing the first year of Organizing for America, the 13-million person network that grew out of the 2008 presidential campaign. “The most comprehensive and insightful account of Obama’s ‘Organizing for America’ to date,” according to Northwestern political scientist Daniel Galvin, the report was covered by New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, Slate, National Journal, Rolling Stone and the BBC.

Melber previously served as a Legislative Aide in the U.S. Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. He also co-founded “Ask The President,” a project to inject citizen questions into White House press conferences, which Columbia Journalism Review dubbed “an idea whose time has come,” and he has participated in several online coalitions advocating open government.

As a commentator on public affairs, Melber frequently appears on national television, including CNBC, C-SPAN, NBC and MSNBC; his views have been quoted by publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and Time, among others; and he has been a featured speaker at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia and NYU, among other institutions. Melber received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. He is a member of the New York Bar and the American Constitution Society.