From today's WaPo:

For political junkies, Todd has become all but inescapable. When he isn't shuttling between studios, he is being invoked as an authority by one anchor or another. After a career out of the limelight, the genial 36-year-old is the campaign season's most improbable TV star.

Every organization has someone like "Chuckie T," as his colleagues call him. He is the brainy guy poring over computer printouts, the number cruncher in the back office. But the voracious appetite of cable news has given him a huge megaphone and an outsize role in shaping coverage of the White House race.

Todd admits to worrying about overexposure, saying: "I don't like going on if I don't feel like I have new information or an interesting way to present the information." But he justifies his ubiquity by noting that audiences drift in and out all day.

When he started at NBC a year ago, Todd felt he was struggling. "The hardest part is to explain the minutiae clearly," he says. "Now I can take the minutiae and make it sound like English for laypeople who haven't been following the DNC delegate rules for 20 years." ...

On a cable channel packed with such opinionated personalities as Olbermann and Chris Matthews, Todd stands out by not being flamboyant. While others are getting punch-drunk on polls, New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley observed, Todd is "the designated driver of MSNBC's political coverage."

Also, who knew that a.) Todd plays the French horn? b.) He didn't graduate college? c.) He thinks he has too many chins?