The Bryn Mawr Club of New York City invites you to hear Elaine Kamarck ’72 and David Wessel Haverford ’75 of The Brookings Institute. They will address the Bi-Co community at an event hosted by Sarah Reid ’74 at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP in midtown.

• What political, social and economic developments brought us Donald Trump?
• What do Elaine and David make of the first month of the Trump presidency? What are the three or four biggest questions about actual policies (not the tweets) of the Trump/GOP Congress regime to which we will have the answers only after a year or two?
• What are the biggest risks?

Elaine C. Kamarck is a Senior Fellow in the Governance Studies program as well as the Director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution.

David Wessel is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings and director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, the mission of which is to improve the quality of fiscal and monetary policies and public understanding of them.

Elaine Karmark is an expert on American electoral politics and government innovation and reform in the United States, OECD nations, and developing countries. She focuses her research on the presidential nomination system and American politics and has worked in many American presidential campaigns. Kamarck is the author of Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates and Why Presidents Fail And How They Can Succeed Again. She is also the author of How Change Happens—or Doesn’t: The Politics of US Public Policy and The End of Government-As We Know It: Making Public Policy Work.

During the event, Kamarck will be signing and selling her latest book published in 2016, Why Presidents Fail And How They Can Succeed Again. In her book, Kamarck analyzes recent presidential failures to understand why Americans have lost faith in their leaders—and how they can get it back. She explains the difficulties of governing in our modern political landscape, and offers examples and recommendations of how our next president can not only recreate faith in leadership but also run a competent, successful administration.

Kamarck is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She started at the Kennedy School in 1997 after a career in politics and government. She has been a member of the Democratic National Committee and the DNC’s Rules Committee since 1997. She has participated actively in four presidential campaigns and in ten nominating conventions—including two Republican conventions. In the 1980s, she was one of the founders of the New Democrat movement that helped elect Bill Clinton president. She served in the White House from 1993 to 1997, where she created and managed the Clinton Administration’s National Performance Review, also known as the “reinventing government initiative.” At the Kennedy School, she served as Director of Visions of Governance for the Twenty-First Century and as Faculty Advisor to the Innovations in American Government Awards Program. In 2000, she took a leave of absence to work as Senior Policy Advisor to the Gore campaign.

Kamarck conducts research on 21st century government, the role of the Internet in political campaigns, homeland defense, intelligence reorganization, and governmental reform and innovation. Kamarck makes regular appearances in the media, including segments on: ABC, CBS, NBC, the BBC, CNN, Fox News Now New England Cable News, and National Public Radio.

Kamarck received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

David Wessel joined Brookings in December 2013 after 30 years on the staff of The Wall Street Journal where, most recently, he was economics editor and wrote the weekly Capital column. He is a contributing correspondent to The Wall Street Journal, appears frequently on NPR’s Morning Edition and tweets often at @davidmwessel.

Wessel is the author of two New York Times best-sellers: In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic (2009) and Red Ink: Inside the High Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget (2012.) He has shared two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 1984 for a Boston Globe series on the persistence of racism in Boston and the other in 2003 for Wall Street Journal stories on corporate scandals. David is a member of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Data Users Advisory Committee. He teaches in the Dartmouth Tuck School of Business Global 2030 executive education program and has been a visiting journalism professor at Princeton University.

A native of New Haven, Connecticut, and a product of its public schools, David is a 1975 graduate of Haverford College. He was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia University in 1980-81.  Wessel has received honoraria for speaking from NMS Management, Tudor Investment Corp., Carlyle Group and Nomura Securities International Inc.

RSVP: Reserve by PayPal Below. Limited space available on a first come, first served basis.
WHAT: Remarks from Elaine Kamarck ’72 and David Wessel H’ford ‘75
WHEN: Thursday, February 16, 2017, 6:30 to 8:30 P.M.
WHERE: Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, 101 Park Avenue at 40th Street, New York, NY 10178 Phone: (212) 808-7800
HOW MUCH: $20. Space is limited
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Helen Thurston at jclosk@earthlink.net.