Lanny J Davis

Lanny Davis has been active in national, state, and local politics for more than fifty years and was a cofounder of the Civility Project, urging all 535 members of Congress and 50 governors to sign a pledge to act civilly (only thee signed).

Throughout the 1990s he served as special counsel to President Bill Clinton and was a spokesperson for the president and the White House on matters concerning campaign finance investigations and other legal issues. In 2005, President George W. Bush appointed Davis as the only Democrat to serve on the five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board created by the US Congress as part of the 2005 Intelligence Reform Act.

As a lawyer in private practice, he counsels individuals, corporations, and others on crisis management and legal issues.

He graduated from Yale University and Yale Law School, where he won the prestigious Thurman Arnold Prize for moot court and served on the Yale Law Journal. He is the author of six other books, including Crisis Tales: Five Rules for Coping with Crises in Business, Politics, and Life and Scandal: How "Gotcha" Politics Is Destroying America, and writes a regular column, Purple Nation, for RealClearPolitics, which has received bipartisan praise.