Roger Simon is the Chief Political Columnist of Politico. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago where politics was a contact sport.

At the Chicago Sun-Times, where he wrote a column four times per week, Simon was taught that the only way for a journalist to look upon a politician was down. He now fights against that impulse daily.

Simon also has been a columnist for the Baltimore Sun, a White House correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the political editor of U.S. News World Report. His column is syndicated to newspapers around the country. He has written columns from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel and South Africa. Simon is a New York Times best-selling author. He has won more than three dozen first-place awards and is the only person to win twice the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award for Commentary.

Simon also won the National Headliner Award three times including 2005 for his coverage of the 2004 presidential election. His work has been included in the "Best Newspaper Writing in America" in three different years.

Simon, who has a B.A. degree in English from the University of Illinois, has been a Poynter Media Fellow at Yale University, a Hoover Media Fellow at Stanford University, and in the spring of 2005 was a Kennedy School of Government Institute of Politics Fellow at Harvard University. He was also inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame, whose members include Carl Sandburg, Ben Hecht, Ring Lardner and Mike Royko.

When Simon dies, he intends to be buried in Chicago, so he can still participate in the politics of that city.