ARLINGTON, Va. — University alum Eugene Robinson’s house was bustling on a humid afternoon late last summer. His nephew was relaxing on the couch, while his wife, Avis, and a friend were chatting and working in the kitchen. Like most in the Washington area in August, the household was preparing for a vacation.

But unlike many Northern Virginia residents, Robinson was also preparing for a television appearance. Later that evening, Robinson would be criticizing Sarah Palin’s approach to health care reform as a guest on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.”

Robinson, a regular guest on “Countdown,” is also a twice-weekly columnist for The Washington Post. He’s addressed a wide range of topics – from the recently passed health care bill to racial profiling. But Robinson wrote one set of columns that got him more attention than usual — his coverage of the 2008 presidential election for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s most prestigious award.

“It was psychedelic, it really was,” Robinson said of winning the award in an interview last summer. “I never thought that a career was in any way invalidated if you didn’t have a Pulitzer because it’s like a crapshoot.”

Robinson said he was sitting with his wife on his patio when Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor of the Post called to tell him that the paper won a Pulitzer for 2008 for his columns.

As he sat on his back porch fiddling with small sticks that fell off the trees outside his home, Robinson described the moment when he found out he had won the prize, calling it “an out-of-body experience.” Robinson added that he was doubly lucky because he won the Pulitzer for covering a story with such huge historical implications.

“In quieter moments it felt like you were watching something really important,” Robinson said of covering the election. “You were learning a lot about the country and the country was learning a lot about itself. You almost couldn’t make this stuff up.”

“(The 2008 presidential election) was the best political story certainly I’ll ever cover, maybe the best story I’ll ever cover, and there were many stories I thought were huge and were hugely important,” he said.

In fact, Robinson began his career covering one of the most talked about stories of the 1970s. As a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Robinson said he got a ticket to the “incredible” trial of Patty Hearst, the heiress of publishing millionaires, who was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army.

“I was the junior reporter on the Patty Hearst trial, which essentially meant I got to carry the handbag of the granddame Carolyn Ansbacker who was the Chronicle’s trial reporter,” Robinson said. “She was a great lady. She chain smoked unfiltered camels, I think they were.”

After covering city politics at the Chronicle for a few years, Robinson applied for a job at The Washington Post and received an unexpected call from the Post’s metro editor at the time.

“I got a phone call from someone who claimed to be Bob Woodward, and I almost didn’t believe it at first, but it was Bob Woodward," Robinson said.

Robinson cut his teeth at the Post covering the first term of Marion Barry, a figure so well-known in Washington that some still call him the city’s “mayor for life.”

Barry was elected mayor in 1978 in a three-way race and was only the second person to be elected to the position — Washington had been given the right from Congress to govern itself less than ten years earlier.

Barry went on to serve three consecutive terms as mayor and was reelected a fourth time, even after being arrested on cocaine charges.

Tom Sherwood, who co-authored “Dream City: Race, Power and the Decline of Washington D.C.,” said Robinson covered Barry during a time when residents had high hopes for the city’s future.