Roberts offers an evening edition

Cokie Roberts has 40 years experience as a broadcaster with NPR and ABC, but her experience with politics goes back to the cradle.

She is the daughter of the late Hale Boggs – who was a member of Congress from 1947 to 1973 and eventually became the U.S. House majority leader – and Lindy Boggs, who was a House member from 1973 to 1991.

She grew up immersed in the feisty local politics of New Orleans and in the momentous politics of Washington, D.C. So when she talks about politics – as she will do on Saturday at the Bing Crosby Theater in a fundraiser for Spokane Public Radio – she can draw on a lifetime of experience.

NPR listeners know her from her regular Monday morning analysis of politics on “Morning Edition.” This week, she speculated on whether legislators would be clueless enough to threaten yet another government shutdown.

Yet to news junkies, her face is almost as familiar as her voice. Roberts began her career as a CBS-TV News reporter in Greece. From 1996 to 2002, she was the co-host of “This Week With Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts” and has been chief Congressional analyst for ABC News. She is in demand on the Sunday morning news talk shows.

She has landed just about every top broadcast journalism award, including the Edward R. Murrow Award and an Emmy Award.

Roberts has also had her share of controversy. Last year, she called Glenn Beck “worse than a clown” and “more like a terrorist,” which prompted a Fox News spokesperson to respond, “Isn’t Cokie best known for lying to her viewers?”

That was a reference to an incident in 1994 when she did a TV news segment in an overcoat in front of the U.S. Capitol, but was actually standing in a studio in front of a green screen.

Roberts is the author of two books on politics and women: “Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation” and “Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation.” She also wrote movingly about her own life and family in “We Are Our Mother’s Daughters.”

In recent years she has branched out into a non-political subject – marriage. She and her husband Stephen V. Roberts collaborated on a book titled “From This Day Forward,” an examination of the rewards and challenges of marriage as practiced today in the United States. She and her husband also write a weekly syndicated news commentary column.

At Saturday’s event, she may also talk about her latest collaboration with her husband, “Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families,” which draws on their own experience.

Roberts is Catholic and her husband is Jewish, and the book arises from their many years of celebrating Passover with family and friends.

In fact, the book began as their own “family handbook” for their Passover Seders.

Her books will be available for sale and she will sign books after her talk.