Author: James

So Who is Jeff Bell

Jeff Bell has worked at the highest levels of American politics and public policy for over forty years. In 1978, at age 34, he became the New Jersey Republican Party nominee for U.S. Senate when he defeated four-term incumbent Clifford Case. As the first major candidate to win on the theme of tax cuts, he produced television ads for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign using the same message. He later worked as an advocate for the bipartisan Tax Reform Act of 1986 with Jack Kemp and Bill Bradley, the man who defeated him in the 1978 general election.

A graduate of Columbia University, Jeff went on to serve in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, where he was an intelligence advisor to the South Vietnamese infantry during the Tet offensive. Upon returning home, he joined the national presidential campaign staff of Richard Nixon in 1968 and later went to work for Ronald Reagan in 1974. He developed Governor Reagan’s first proposals for federal tax and spending reduction when Reagan ran for president in 1976. During the 1980 campaign, Jeff was elected from New Jersey as a Reagan delegate to the Republican national convention.

From 1988-2000, Jeff served as president of Lehrman Bell Mueller Cannon Inc., an economic forecasting and consulting firm. From 2000-2010, he was a principal of Capital City Partners, where he worked on promoting comprehensive immigration reform, the Bush Administration’s faith-based initiatives, and combating human trafficking, among other issues. In 2009, he was among the co-founders of the American Principles Project, a public policy organization dedicated to advancing conservative ideas derived from the principles of the American founding. As Policy Director, he headed its monetary reform initiative aimed at renewing sound money by restoring the dollar’s value in gold. He resigned from that position in February 2014 to run for U.S. Senate.

Jeff is the author of two books, The Case for Polarized Politics: Why America Needs Social Conservatism (2012), for which he was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and Rush Limbaugh, and Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality (1992). His articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Weekly Standard, National Review, and various other outlets. He has served as a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy Institute of Politics, visiting professor at the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers University, the DeWitt Wallace Fellow in Communications at the American Enterprise Institute, and as a board member of the American Conservative Union and Campaign Finance Institute. From 1978 to 1980, he served as the president of the Manhattan Institute.

Jeff and his wife Rosalie have been married since 1983 and have three sons and one daughter ranging in ages from 19 to 28 as well as a one-year-old granddaughter.