What Does America Stand for Today? with discussants Michael Sandel, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, Amy Gutmann, Theodore B. Olson, Sen. Arlen Specter and Alan Wolfe. Mickey Edwards moderates the discussion.
Some of the most inspired and provocative thinkers, writers, artists, business people, teachers and other leaders drawn from myriad fields and from across the country and around the world all gathered in a single place - to teach, speak, lead, question, and answer at the 2006 Aspen Ideas Festival. Throughout the week, they all interacted with an audience of thoughtful people who stepped back from their day-to-day routines to delve deeply into a world of ideas, thought, and discussion.
Bio
Mickey Edwards
Mickey Edwards is director of the Aspen Institute-Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership. Edwards represented Oklahoma in Congress for 16 years, where he was a member of the House Republican leadership. He is currently a lecturer at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and he has taught at Harvard, Harvard Law School, and Georgetown University. Edwards also been an advisor to the State Department and is a director of the Constitution Project. He has been a columnist for a number of newspapers, is the author of two books, and is co-author of a third. He has chaired task forces on foreign policy for The Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Representative Rahm Emanuel
Rahm Emanuel has represented the 5th District of Illinois in the US House of Representatives from 2003 until his resignation in 2009. Rep. Emanuel serves on the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees taxes, trade, Social Security, and Medicare issues, and he is chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In January 2007, he was elected to serve as Democratic Caucus chair. He began his career with the consumer rights organization Illinois Public Action. He worked on Paul Simon’s 1984 election to the US Senate and in 1989 served as a senior advisor and chief fund-raiser for Richard M. Daley. He also served as a senior advisor to President Bill Clinton. After leaving the White House, he returned to Chicago to serve as a managing director at a leading global investment bank.
Amy Gutmann
Amy Gutmann became the eighth president of the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. She is a political scientist and philosopher and currently serves as a professor of Political Science, with secondary faculty appointments in the Philosophy Department, the Annenberg School for Communication, and the Graduate School of Education. She teaches, lectures, and writes extensively on ethics, justice theory, deliberative democracy, and democratic education, and she has edited and written many articles and books, including Why Deliberative Democracy?, Identity in Democracy, Democratic Education, Democracy and Disagreement, and Color Conscious. Previously she served as provost at Princeton University, where she was also the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and founding director of the Center for Human Values.
Theodore B. Olson
Theodore B. Olson served as the 42nd United States Solicitor General from 2001 to 2004. Previously he was an assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Reagan Administration and a partner in the Los Angeles office of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher. He has argued many cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including issues of copyright, telecommunications, federal securities regulation, antitrust, the environment, school vouchers, criminal law, immigration, due process, voting rights, equal protection, the separation of powers, and the constitutionality of campaign finance reform law.
He successfully represented George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the Supreme Court Bush v. Gore cases after the 2000 presidential election. He has written and lectured extensively on appellate advocacy, oral advocacy in the courtroom, and constitutional law.
Michael Sandel
Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught political philosophy since 1980.
He is the author of Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 1982, 2nd edition, 1997; translated into eight foreign languages), Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1996), Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (Harvard University Press, 2005), and The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Harvard University Press, 2007).
His writings also appear in general publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and The New York Times.
Senator Arlen Specter
Arlen Specter is Pennsylvania's senior Senator, elected to the Senate and 1980 and currently serving his fifth term. He is the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee and a senior member of the Appropriations and Veterans Affairs Committees. He also serves on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, overseeing federal funding for the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and many education programs.
He has also served as chairman of the Senate's intelligence committee. A champion of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and an advocate for veterans and for national security, he is a lawyer and a former Philadelphia district attorney.
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