TULANE TALK

November 6, 2009

Good Morning:

This coming Monday and Tuesday, Nov. 9 and 10, Tulane University will welcome some of the country’s top political strategists, commentators and pundits to campus for the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Inaugural Political Summit.

The list of participants includes Barack Obama’s lead pollster; John McCain’s campaign adviser; the senior advisor and strategist for John Kerry’s presidential campaign; the top media adviser to Bush-Cheney ’04 and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns; the senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign; a leading columnist for The Washington Times and the Washington editor-at-large for The Huffington Post plus many, many more. James Carville and Mary Matalin, two people who epitomize the value of bipartisanship, will serve as honorary co-chairs of the summit.

I hope you will be able to attend some of the summit’s sessions, which will take place in the Kendall Cram Room on the second floor of the Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life. The panels open to the public on Monday, Nov. 9 include What’s Fair in Politics? from 2:45 – 3:45 p.m. (opening remarks will begin at 2:30 p.m.) and Assessing the Obama Presidency from 4 – 5 p.m. On Tuesday, Nov. 10 the panels open to the public will be Looking Ahead to 2010 and 2012 from 9:45 – 10:45 a.m. (opening remarks will begin at 9:30 a.m.) and The Role of the Media in Elections from 11 a.m. – 12 p.m. If you can’t make the panels in person, you can view a live webcast at http://www.bipartisanpolicy.org/NOLA2009.

The list of participants at this event is as impressive as it is potentially combustible. But the theme of the summit is Taking the Poison Out of Partisanship and the purpose of the Bipartisan Policy Center is to demonstrate that consensus and principled compromise can be achieved on difficult issues when policy differences are debated in a thoughtful and constructive manner. These are ideals I think all of us can agree on, regardless of our political affiliation.

Have a great weekend,