Reaching across the aisle

Mary Kate Cary, a Miller Center practitioner senior fellow, served as a White House speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush from 1989 to early 1992, authoring more than 100 of his presidential addresses. She also has ghostwritten several books related to President Bush’s life and career and served as senior writer for communications for the 1988 Bush-Quayle presidential campaign.

Today, Cary is asked to write speeches, presentations, and reports for a variety of national political, corporate, and nonprofit leaders. Her assignments have included State of the Union responses, Republican National Convention addresses, and TED talks. She served as founding managing editor of the daily political news service The Hotline, as a staffer at ABC News’ This Week with David Brinkley, and as a columnist at U.S. News & World Report.

Over the course of a 20-year career in public service, Chris Lu, the Miller Center's Teresa A. Sullivan Practitioner Senior Fellow, worked in all three branches of the federal government, including seven years in the Obama Administration. From 2014 to 2017, Lu was the deputy secretary of labor, having been confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate. In this role, he served as the chief operating officer of a department with 17,000 employees and a $12 billion budget.

David Leblang, Randolph P. Compton Professor at the Miller Center, is the Ambassador Henry J. Taylor and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Endowed Professor of Politics. He is also professor of public policy at the University's Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, where he is director of the Global Policy Center. 

A scholar in the area of international political economy, he is currently working on two major projects. The first is a book-length study of the role that global migration plays in linking host and home countries and how these linkages help explain observed patterns of international investment, remittance flows, and the spread of democracy. The second project is related but focuses on the destination choices of refugees and illegal migrants.