Matt Miller vacating the center on KCRW

Friday's episode of "Left, Right and Center" on KCRW will be the last one with Matt Miller holding down the middle seat as host and moderator. No official word yet on a replacement. "Stay tuned," the station says. Miller has been the host of LR&C for a long time — since the mid-90s according to KCRW.

Miller ran for Congress last year, taking his shot at the Henry Waxman seat won eventually by Democrat Ted Lieu of the South Bay. It didn't go well. He wrote about the experience for Politico in a piece called Mr. Miller Doesn't Go to Washington. Excerpt:

My metamorphosis from normal civilian to retriever of discarded propaganda—a journey into the maddening, depressing, exhilarating, surreal and even occasionally inspiring world of a modern congressional campaign—had begun on a freezing day in Manhattan four months earlier. I was walking near Columbus Circle on January 30, when I felt my phone vibrate. It was a Politico Breaking News alert. The legendary Californian congressman Henry Waxman had announced he would not be running for reelection. I stopped in my tracks.

The bell had sounded.

I’d lived in Waxman’s district on the west side of Los Angeles for 18 years, and I always thought that when he stepped down, I would consider running for his seat. I had worked in the Clinton White House from 1993 to 1995, on the wonk side of things, and had flirted with the idea of jumping into electoral politics even back then. When we left the administration, my then-girlfriend, Jody, and I were about to get engaged. She worked for Clinton, too. She served as Clinton counselor David Gergen’s deputy and special assistant to the president when I was Alice Rivlin’s top aide in the budget office. We were a White House romance before White House romance got a bad name.

Miller's website.