Mike McCurry

Mike McCurry is a partner at Public Strategies Washington Inc. where he provides strategic communications counsel. He is a co-chairman of Hands off the Internet, a coalition of telecommunication-related businesses. McCurry served as press secretary to President Bill Clinton from 1995 until 1998.

His views and opinions on the 2006 elections are as follows: I think what we need is a new politics of the center that with the right kind of charismatic candidate could lead to the development of a third party. I think that may happen as we look ahead to 2008. So the big question in American politics now – is it [the American political party system] binary or is it tripartite?

Presidential wannabe Mike Huckabee seems to have forgotten about how the Ds and the Rs worked together to give us the Patriot Act, the War and Iraq, and numerous other assaults on our freedom:

You have parties that essentially don’t work together to solve problems, and I think people in America are not so much looking for an ideological government, they’re looking for a problem-solving government.

White House correspondent Mike Allen more or less admits that he ignores candidates who don’t have an R or a D attached to their name:

One of the ways that you’re able to sort of keep things down the middle is that you spend as much time talking to the opposition as you do talking to your candidate. So if I’m, for instance, covering President Bush in 2004 and I have the privilege to be on Air Force One covering his events, I’ll also talk during the day to the Kerry campaign on my cell phone, read their e-mails as they come through to our Treos or Blackberrys or the other little devices that we carry.

So at the end of the day, if you’re covering a candidate, you know the best argument for what they’re saying because you hear their events, talk to the staff members who love and appreciate them, and you know any holes there might be in that argument because you’re doing the research yourself, often with the aid of the other side. So what we try to do is bring those together and give people the complete package.

Political scientists will tell you that the almost natural result of that is two dominant parties running for the center, trying to offend as few people as possible, and that’s what gives us situations where everybody avoids the issues when they’re running for office, situations where you have groupthink to a certain extent in legislatures, such as the resounding vote in allowing President Bush to take us to war in Iraq.

I am agreeing with views and opinions by Mr. Mike McCurry since from the opposite side of the political divide, Mike McCurry has strikingly similar views. He watched the Gingrich revolution from his perch as Clinton’s press secretary from 1995 until 1998. Democratic and Republican strategists Mike McCurry and Jack Oliver and Shayne Moore, a stay-at-home mom queuing up to vote. It urges Americans to ask “what does your candidate think” about global poverty when casting a vote at the polls.

In 2004, when congressional Democrats discussed how the party could connect with religious Americans, there was one man everyone wanted in the room: Mike McCurry.

Not only was McCurry press secretary for President Bill Clinton — one of the last Democrats to earn amens from the choir — he is also a Methodist Sunday school teacher and a board member at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington.

“Mike lives his faith in such a committed way and believes deeply that public service is a form of Christian vocation,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.

McCurry, who turns 52 next week, is best known for facing down the media during the Clinton impeachment proceedings — a chore that won him the respect (and sympathy) of his peers. More recently, he advised Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign on religious outreach after the candidate began to take heat from Catholic conservatives.

(for more details, see the  www.uselectionatlas.org official site)