Mark Forman
Mark Forman is an accomplished Executive with more than 28 years of professional work experience, including a Presidential appointment to be the first U.S. Administrator for E-Government and Information Technology, the Federal Government's Chief Information Officer. Mr. Forman has a long record of accomplishments in government management reforms, as a government employee, political appointee, and management consultant. Mr. Forman is currently the Co-founder of Government Transaction Services, Inc. which was established in 2010 to be the leading provider of cloud-based business process and transaction services supporting organizations that do business with thefederal government.
Frank Luntz
Frank Luntz is one of the most honored communication professionals in America today. "The Nostradamus of pollsters," said Sir David Frost. Time magazine named him one of "50 of America's most promising leaders aged 40 and under." The Boston Globe named him the "hottest pollster" in America. His focus groups have become so influential that presidential candidate Barack Obama had this to say following the PBS presidential debate, "When Frank Luntz invites you to talk to his focus group, you talk to his focus group." In 2008, Frank was the "Focus Group Czar" for Fox News, conducting over 40 sessions in 14 states, as well as co-hosting four live hour-long prime time specials and dial sessions during every debate.
James Carville
James Carville is America's best-known political consultant. His long list of electoral successes includes Bill Clinton's campaign for the presidency in 1992. He first came to national prominence in the 1980s when he steered the successful gubernatorial campaign of Robert Casey in Pennsylvania. In the 1990s he helped Zell Miller become governor of Georgia and in 1991 led Senator Harris Wofford's surprising come-from-behind victory after being down forty points. Carville served in the Marines for two years and earned a law degree at Louisiana State University. He runs campaigns around the world and appears often on television. In 2008 he moved with his wife Mary Matalin and two daughters to New Orleans.
Richard Dreyfuss
Academy Award winner Richard Dreyfuss has appeared in nearly 100 movies and numerous plays. A Senior Associate Member of St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, he has devoted most of the last six years to the study of civics. For many years he served on the Board of Trustees of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Recently, he has helped the Civil War Preservation Trust draw attention to the commercial encroachment of historic battlefields. In 2008 he sponsored a civics conference in London. His website, TheDreyfussInitiative, is committed to teaching "our kids how to run our country with common sense."
Anthony Bontrager
Anthony Bontrager is a well known thought-leader and executive within the digital and social media spaces as well as the broadcasting and mobile telecom industries. Most recently, Bontrager was President of Onecast where he established the company's media partnerships with NBC, FOX, BBC Worldwide, Bloomberg, Dow Jones and others. Prior to Onecast, Bontrager was President and CEO of Broadstream Communications (now Avail-TVN), a company he co-founded, which became the telecom industry's first virtual head-end and middleware platform for IPTV delivery. Under Anthony's leadership, Broadstream secured the largest library of IP-content rights from Disney/ABC, ESPN, Discovery, Showtime, Turner Networks and others. A prolific blogger on the digital media landscape, Bontrager sits on the advisory boards of SATCON and is a current member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences - Interactive Media and Film Groups.
James Fallows
James Fallows is National Correspondent for the Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for more than 25 years, based in Washington DC, Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford. In addition to working for the Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft.
Lynne Munson
Lynne Munson is president and executive director of Common Core. She is also president of Six Consulting, Inc., which provides education policy advice and research to clients at the state and national levels. She served as Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from 2001-2005, overseeing all agency operations. Ms. Munson is the author of Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance (Ivan R. Dee, 2000).
Rick Perlstein
Rick Perlstein is a historian and journalist and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner). Nixonland has been named one of the three best books of the year by the editors at Amazon.com and a New York Times notable book for 2008, and has been named on year-end "best of" lists by over a dozen publications. His first book was Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001).
Diane Ravitch
Diane Ravitch (Ph.D., Columbia University), is co-chair of Common Core and research professor of education at New York University. From 1991 to 1993, Ms. Ravitch was Assistant Secretary of Education and Counselor to Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. She was responsible for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education. As Assistant Secretary, she led the federal effort to promote the creation of state and national academic standards. She is the author of many books, including, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010).
Lorena Chambers
Lorena Chambers is the CEO and co-founder of Chambers Lopez & Gaitán LLC located in Arlington, Virginia. Chambers Lopez & Gaitán delivers integrated strategies for political and social marketing campaigns that communicate effectively with voters and consumers, especially with communities of color. Most recently, Ms. Chambers developed the creative campaign for www.healthequityforall.org, which launched in October 2009. In 2008, she led the only third-party advertising campaign targeting Hispanic voters to help elect President Obama, while also creating the Hispanic media for Senator Mark Warner's successful campaign in Virginia.
Mindy Finn
Mindy Finn, a political communications strategist, has dedicated her career to citizen-powered politics in the digital age. Finn co-founded Engage with fellow digital strategist Patrick Ruffini, where she has worked on some of the toughest battles in recent political history, including Senator Scott Brown's landmark victory in Massachusetts, Governor Bob McDonnell's campaign in Virginia and the Republican Governors Association's campaign in the New Jersey Governor's race. She currently works with over a dozen electoral, issue, and corporate public affairs campaigns. Additionally, Engage owns iContribute, a grassroots fundraising marketing platform for politics. Before Engage, Finn served as the Director of "e" Strategy for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.
Andrew Rasiej
Andrew Rasiej is the Founder of Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference and website covering the intersection of politics and technology; as well as techPresident, a group blog that covers how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the web, and how content generated by voters is affecting the campaign. He has served as an advisor to Senators and Congressman and political candidates on the use of Information Technology for campaign and policy purposes since 1999.
Merrill Brown
Merrill Brown is a strategy consultant and the founder and principal of MMB Media LLC. Clients have ranged from companies in the news, information and wireless businesses to a large foundation. Brown recently served as Senior Strategist for Journalism Online. Brown was the founding Editor in Chief of MSNBC.com and from 2005 through December 2007 served as National Editorial Director of News for the 21st Century: Incubators of New Ideas (News 21), part of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. Brown served as Chairman of the Board of NowPublic, the leading citizen journalism company in the world. NowPublic was sold to Examiner.com in 2009.
Michael Medved
Best-selling author Michael Medved hosts a daily three-hour radio talk show that reaches more than 4 million listeners on more than 200 stations across the country, drawing an audience that ranks as one of the top 7 political radio programs in the United States. His most recent best seller The 10 Big Lies About America rebuts the most pernicious, anti-American distortions about the nation's history, and the follow-up volume, The 5 Big Lies About American Business, became a Main Selection of the Conservative Book Club in 2010.
John Carlson
From 9 till noon each weekday, John Carlson hosts a daily program on KOMO Newsradio, and also does news commentary on KOMO radio. He was a television commentator on KIRO-TV (CBS) for seven years, and wrote a newspaper column for twenty years. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, National Review and the Weekly Standard. In the 80?s and 90?s, he founded and led a successful think tank, the Washington Policy Center, which has received praise from several presidents and governors in both political parties for the quality and influence of its work.
