Jeffrey Bell

Jeffrey Bell is a Visiting Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.  In that capacity, he published The Case for Polarized Politics: Why America Needs Social Conservatism (Encounter Books, 2012).

Mr. Bell is a principal of Capital City Partners, a Washington public affairs firm.  In that capacity, he has assisted clients advocating the Bush tax cuts of 2001-2003, the President’s faith-based initiative, and immigration reform.  Since 2003, he has participated in Capital City Partners’ contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to promote greater awareness of human trafficking in the United States.

In 1975 Mr. Bell developed Ronald Reagan’s first proposals for federal tax and budget reduction.  In 1978, he became an early proponent of the Kemp-Roth tax cut bill and upset an incumbent U.S. Senator, Clifford Case, in the New Jersey Republican primary.  He was defeated in the general election by Democrat Bill Bradley.

In 1980, Mr. Bell produced and co-wrote the television commercials used by the Reagan presidential campaign in New Hampshire and subsequent primaries.  He was also elected as a Reagan delegate from New Jersey to that year’s Republican national convention.  As deputy chairman of the pro-Reagan group Citizens for America, he played an active role in passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986.

A graduate of Columbia and a veteran of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, Mr. Bell has served as a fellow of the Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard, visiting professor at the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers, and as the DeWitt Wallace Fellow in Communications at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.  He presently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Conservative Union and of the Campaign Finance Institute at George Washington University.

Mr. Bell has written articles for many publications, most recently the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard.  He is author of Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality, which was called by Fred Barnes in the New Republic “the most important political book” of 1992.  He lives with his wife and four children in Annandale, Virginia.