New School President Bob Kerrey engages in an informal discussion with Tom Daschle, former U.S. senator and congressman, leading health-care reform advocate, and public policy expert.

With more than 25 years of service in the House of Representatives and the Senate and ten years as Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle has played an instrumental role in the development of U.S. legislative and regulatory policy. Following eight years as a congressman, Daschle joined the U.S. Senate in 1986. He is one of the longest-serving Senate Democratic leaders in history and the only one to serve twice as both majority and minority leader. During his tenure, Daschle navigated the Senate through some of its most historic economic and national security challenges. He chronicled some of these experiences in his book Like No Other Time: The 107th Congress and the Two Years That Changed America Forever (2003).

Daschle is currently a special policy advisor with the law firm of Alston & Bird LLP, where he provides clients with strategic advice on public policy issues such as climate change, energy, health care, trade, financial services, and telecommunications. Since leaving the Senate, his health care reform expertise has come to greater prominence with the publication of Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis. He has also emerged as a leading thinker on climate change and renewable energy policy.

In 2007, he joined with former Majority Leaders George Mitchell, Bob Dole, and Howard Baker to create the Bipartisan Policy Center, an organization dedicated to finding common ground on some of the pressing public policy challenges of our time. Daschle serves on the boards of the Center for American Progress and the National Democratic Institute and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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