Jeff Lord

Jeffrey "Jeff" Lord is a former member of the Ronald Reagan administration, a former White House associate political director 1987–1988, journalist, author, and political strategist in Pennsylvania.^[1]

Early life and education

Lord earned a degree from Franklin and Marshall College.^[2] He first worked as a press aide in the Pennsylvania State Senate.^[2] He worked for Pennsylvania congressman Bud Shuster as legislative director and press secretary and for U.S. senator H. John Heinz III as executive assistant.^[2] Later, Lord worked as chief of staff to Drew Lewis, for part of the time that Lewis was a co-chairman of Pennsylvania for the Ronald Reagan presidential campaign.^[2] He also served in the Reagan White House as an associate political director.^[2] In that position, he assisted in the judicial nomination process for several nominees, including Robert Bork.^[3] He also worked for Jack Kemp during the presidency of George H. W. Bush.^[2]

Career

Lord now works as a journalist, contributing material to CNN, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, National Review Online, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Harrisburg Patriot-News. He has appeared as a guest on numerous television and radio programs.^[2] He also works as a political consultant for Quantum Communications, a Harrisburg-based political strategy firm.^[2]

He is the author of The Borking Rebellion, about the confirmation of Federal Judge D. Brooks Smith.^[2] It received a generally positive review in the Wall Street Journal.^[4]

Controversies

In July 2010, Lord claimed that the "lynching" of a relative of Shirley Sherrod was fallacious.^[5]

In August 2011, Lord wrote an article in The American Spectator that was critical of Congressman Ron Paul (Republican, Texas), and the views of some of Ron Paul's supporters.^[6] It sparked considerable debate within the conservative movement.^[7]

In May 2012, Lord wrote an article in The American Spectator that compared President Barack Obama with Mao Zedong because of the similarities between Barack Obama's slogan "Forward" and Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward.^[8] In the same article, he also compared Obama with the Hitler Youth due to their song "Vorwärts! Vorwärts!" ("Forward, Forward!").

In February 2015, Lord called upon the Republican Party to demand an apology from the Democratic Party in their role in promoting and defending slavery and creating the segregationist Jim Crow system.^[9]

In June 2015, Lord wrote an open letter to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the head of the U.S. Democratic Party, asking her to apologize for her party's role in Indian removal, promoting and defending slavery, Confederate secession, and creating segregationist Jim Crow regimes, saying that the Democrats' historical support for such institutions contributed and contributes to the continuing existence of racism and bigotry in American society.^[10]

In March 2016, during a Super Tuesday election night on CNN, an argument ensued for several minutes between Lord and a CNN contributor, Van Jones, about Lord's defense of Donald Trump. It came about when a fellow contributor, conservative commentator S. E. Cupp, accused Trump of "crazy, dog whistle policy proposals", that she believed he had made to attract prejudiced voters,^[11] and because Trump had hesitated to disavow KKK member David Duke in a CNN interview the previous weekend. Lord responded that the KKK many decades ago had supported Democrats and were therefore left wing, and accused those who raised these worries of dividing Americans by race.^[12] Van Jones questioned the relevance of the first point and declared the second point "absurd".^[13]

Bibliography

• The Borking Rebellion: The Never-Before-Told Story of How a Group of Pennsylvania Women Attorneys took on the Entire U. S. Senate Judiciary Committee—And Won. Katco Literary Group. 2005. ISBN 978-0-9646484-4-9. 

References

External links

• Contributors: Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Ron Paul and the Neoliberal – American Spectator
• When Ronald Reagan Endorsed Ron Paul – The Atlantic