Campaign Expert and Colbert Guest Trevor Potter Discusses Campaign Finance October 16

CHESTERTOWN, MD—More than $600 million has been spent on election advertising in the 2012 presidential campaign, most of it in just three swing states. Can special-interest and corporate money buy an election?

That’s one question that will be addressed on Tuesday, October 16, in a talk by Trevor Potter, former Chairman of the Federal Election Commission, founder of the Campaign Legal Center and a leading authority on lobbying regulation, government ethics, and campaign finance issues. The event will take place at 5:30 p.m. in Hynson Lounge, Hodson Hall, at Washington College.

Potter is perhaps best known as a regular guest on “The Colbert Report” – in fact, journalist Bill Moyers has called him “the man who keeps Stephen Colbert out of jail.” Potter set up the Colbert Super PAC, “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow,” and appears regularly on the Comedy Central program to explain the muddy legalities of campaign finance.

The American Bar Association Journal described Potter as “hands-down one of the top lawyers in the country on the delicate intersection of politics, law, and money.” He was general counsel to both the 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns of Senator John McCain and deputy general counsel to George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign. He also was one of the leading lawyers behind the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, commonly known as McCain-Feingold and considered the most significant campaign-finance law in 30 years.

Potter is featured in the cover story of the latest issue of The Atlantic. The magazine describes him as America’s leading advocate of the position that “more money, more anonymity, and more spending by non­candidates are bad things, dangerous to democracy.”

“The Anatomy of an Election: Money” is the third event in a four-part series on the 2012 presidential election, co-sponsored by Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and the Louis L. Goldstein Program in Public Affairs.

The series concludes on October 23 with an event on the role of media. Panelists will include Betsy Fischer, longtime executive producer of Meet the Press, political reporters James Hohmann and Jonathan Martin of Politico, and Washington College alumnus Jack Bohrer ’06, who has written about politics for many publications, including The New Republic and Salon.

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Founded in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, Washington College is a private, independent college of liberal arts and sciences located in colonial Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience is dedicated to fostering innovative approaches to the American past and present. Through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach, and a special focus on written history, the Starr Center seeks to bridge the divide between the academic world and the public at large.

The Louis L. Goldstein Program in Public Affairs was established at the College in 1990 to encourage students to enter public service by introducing them to exemplary leaders, both in and out of government. The Goldstein Program sponsors lectures, symposia and visiting fellows, student participation in models and conferences, and other projects that bring students and faculty together with leaders experienced in developing public policy.

"Victory Lab" Author Reveals the Secret New Science of Winning in Politics, October 2

CHESTERTOWN, MD— Gone are the days when you could win the presidency just by making speeches and kissing babies. Instead, as a new book by journalist Sasha Issenberg chronicles, today’s campaigns are run by teams of technicians using statistics, behavioral psychology and data-mining to determine just how millions of Americans will vote. Issenberg will discuss his findings in a free public talk on Tuesday, October 2, at Washington College.

The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns was published this month by Crown Books; a review in The New Republic called it “a timely, rare, and valuable attempt to unveil the innovations revolutionizing campaign politics.” For instance, Issenberg describes a “micro-targeting system” that the Obama campaign uses to predict the preference of every voter in the country. Other candidates use new insights from behavioral psychology in crafting their message and persona.

Issenberg’s talk will begin at 5:30 p.m. in Hynson Lounge, Hodson Hall, on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue, and will be followed by a book signing.

Sasha Issenberg is the Washington correspondent for Monocle. He covered the 2008 presidential campaign for The Boston Globe as a national political reporter, and has written for The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and George, where he served as a contributing editor. He is also the author of The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy.

“Sasha Issenberg is our most acute observer of the modern political campaign,” says the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer. “He takes us beyond the charge-and-counter-charge, the rallies and stump speeches, to show us the hidden persuaders. This is the politics you'll never see on the nightly news.”

The Issenberg event is the second in a four-part series, “The Anatomy of an Election,” cosponsored by the College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and the Louis L. Goldstein Program in Public Affairs. The series continues on Oct. 16 with Trevor Potter, the former chair of the Federal Election Commission and a regular guest on “The Colbert Report,” who will talk about the problematic role of money in presidential politics, especially since the rise of so-called Super PACs. General counsel to John McCain’s 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns, Potter has been described by the American Bar Association Journal as “hands-down one of the top lawyers in the country on the delicate intersection of politics, law and money.”

The series concludes with an Oct. 23 event on the role of media. Panelists include Betsy Fischer, longtime executive producer of Meet the Press, political reporters James Hohmann and Jonathan Martin of Politico, and Washington College alumnus Jack Bohrer ’06, who has written about politics for many publications, including The New Republic and Salon.

Founded in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, Washington College is a private, independent college of liberal arts and sciences located in colonial Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. For more information, www.washcoll.edu.

The College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience is dedicated to fostering innovative approaches to the American past and present. Through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach, and a special focus on written history, the Starr Center seeks to bridge the divide between the academic world and the public at large. For more information on the Center, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

The Louis L. Goldstein Program in Public Affairs was established at the College in 1990 to encourage students to enter public service by introducing them to exemplary leaders, both in and out of government. The Goldstein Program sponsors lectures, symposia and visiting fellows, student participation in models and conferences, and other projects that bring students and faculty together with leaders experienced in developing public policy. For more information, visit http://academics.washcoll.edu/goldsteinprogram/.

Renowned Political Writers Cramer and Bai Kick Off WC’s Lecture Series on U.S. Elections Sept. 18

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Two of America’s premier political reporters will kick off a four-part lecture series, “The Anatomy of an Election,” at Washington College on Tuesday, September 18. 

Matt Bai, author, columnist and chief political correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, and Richard Ben Cramer, author of What It Takes: The Way to the White House, widely acclaimed as one of the best books ever written on presidential politics, will talk about the 2012 election, American politics and the kinds of people it attracts.

The event, which is free and open to the public, begins at 5:30 p.m. in Decker Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts, on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue, in Chestertown.

Matt Bai covers politics for the
New York Times Magazine.

Bai has spent the past decade writing about politics for the Times, where he covered both the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns and is now covering the 2012 contest. He also writes the “Political Times” column for the Times politics and government blog, The Caucus. His critically acclaimed book The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics (Penguin, 2007) was named a Times Notable Book of the Year. He is currently working on a book about the failed era of boomer politics.

Cramer learned his politics as a cub reporter for The Baltimore Sun.  His newspaper career later carried him to the Middle East for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Subsequently, he became a magazine reporter, a bestselling author, a writer of TV documentaries and a resident of Chestertown.

Richard Ben Cramer wrote
the book on what it takes
to run for U.S. president.

“We are very excited to launch this election-season series with two great political journalists,” says Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, which is co-sponsoring the series with the Goldstein Program in Public Affairs. “Matt Bai’s reporting is deeper, more timeless and, ultimately, much more informative than the common run of political news. And Richard Ben Cramer wrote the book that inspired Bai and an entire generation of young reporters to make politics their subject.”

The series continues Oct. 2 with Sasha Issenberg, a columnist for Slate and Washington correspondent for Monocle who covered the 2008 election for The Boston Globe. Issenberg will talk about his new book, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns (Crown, 2012), which shows us the hidden persuaders behind the roller coaster that is the election news cycle.

On Oct. 16, Trevor Potter, the former chair of the Federal Election Commission who has been described by the American Bar Association Journal as “hands-down one of the top lawyers in the country on the delicate intersection of politics, law and money,” will talk about campaign finance. General counsel to John McCain’s 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns, he is the founding president and general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center, which defends and enforces campaign finance, election and ethics laws.

The series concludes on Oct. 23 with Washington College alumnus Jack Bohrer ’06, who has written about politics for many publications, including The New Republic and Salon, along with Betsy Fischer, longtime executive producer of Meet the Press, and veteran political reporters James Hohmann and Jonathan Martin of Politico, talking about “Media and Personalities” in the presidential campaign.

Founded in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, Washington College is a private, independent college of liberal arts and sciences located in colonial Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. For more information, www.washcoll.edu.

The College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience is dedicated to fostering innovative approaches to the American past and present. Through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach, and a special focus on written history, the Starr Center seeks to bridge the divide between the academic world and the public at large. For more information on the Center, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

The Louis L. Goldstein Program in Public Affairs was established at the College in 1990 to encourage students to enter public service by introducing them to exemplary leaders, both in and out of government. The Goldstein Program sponsors lectures, symposia and visiting fellows, student participation in models and conferences, and other projects that bring students and faculty together with leaders experienced in developing public policy. For more information, visit http://academics.washcoll.edu/goldsteinprogram/.