Jay Cost has been a top political analyst for nearly a decade. He currently writes MORNING JAY for The Weekly Standard. He got his start with his simple, no-frills "Horse Race Blog" in September, 2004 because he was sick and tired of the inane media coverage of the Bush-Kerry contest. With his data-driven approach to the election, he was consistently ahead of the curve, and by the end of the campaign season his blog was drawing thousands of readers a day. In 2005 he began working for the premier political website RealClearPolitics, where his audience reached into the hundreds of thousands. It was there that he again was ahead of the curve covering the battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, predicting earlier than anybody else that Obama would be a real challenge to Clinton, then later sensing accurately that Clinton was down but not out. Today, he writes a twice-weekly column for the top conservative opinion journal The Weekly Standard.