Happy Birthday Mike Allen!

Today is the birthday of "the man the White House wakes up to." That's Politico's Playbook Author Mike Allen, who was born in 1964 in Orange County, Calif. You won't see this news in his own birthday section -- he's not that sort of guy. So we wanted to shower him with Happy Birthday wishes here. (h/t ABC's Jonathan Karl, who tweeted the news this morning, saying, "Happy Birthday Mike Allen, the one birthday you won't read about in Playbook.") We have remarks from a special person in Allen's life: NJ's Marc Ambinder, who lobbed a public grenade at Playbook last week at the Page One screening/panel at the Newseum. Ambinder specifically criticized Allen's select birthday listings for "further politicizing Washington" and for "pushing the Administration's agenda." The pair later exchanged relative niceties over email. Ambinder's birthday message for Allen is as follows: "Happy Birthday to the best-sourced, most jealousy-inducing and nicest journo I know (and like to occasionally public tweak)." NYT's Mark Leibovich, who wrote the immense 2010 profile on Allen, remarked, "Is it his birthday? If it wasn't in Playbook, how can we be sure he (or anyone) was really born? It's the DC equivalent of the long-form birth certificate." When asked for birthday comments for Allen, Politico Editor-in-Chief John Harris wrote: "Mike and I have known each other for 20 years--we were both young reporters in Richmond--and I think we've been friends longer than any of his other Washington colleagues. He was a force of nature then and is a force of nature now. One of the most exceptional journalists of his generation, and one of the most exceptional people." We at FishbowlDC wish Allen a very Happy Birthday. UPDATE: ABC's Ann Compton tweeted a birthday message to Allen today. She wrote, "Happy Birthday to the guy in the only picture on my WH booth wall." See the photograph after the jump...

Fishbowl

Happy Birthday Mike Allen!

Betsy Rothstein

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Betsy Rothstein