Candidates to Consider:
Nealin Parker
Sarah Holewinski
Dafna Hochman Rand
Halie Soifer
Nina Hachigian
Colin Kahl
Tony Blinken
Pete Buttigieg
Julie Smith
Rose Jackson
Molly Kinder
If they don’t win Congressional seats:
Tom Malinowski
Elissa Slotkin
Lauren Baer
Nealin Parker
Nealin Parker, former Chief of Staff for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on March 14, 2014. As Chief of Staff for Secretary Julián Castro and former Secretary Shaun Donovan, Nealin was a key member of the leadership team who helped oversee more than 8,000 employees and a $46 billion annual budget. Known for her ability to distill complex information, build consensus on tough issues and for her highly effective, personal management style, Nealin has helped lead large, complex organizations across the public and private sectors. Prior to HUD, Nealin was the Acting Director of the Office of Transition Initiatives at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID/OTI). OTI was established after the fall of the Berlin Wall to provide rapid response to political crises globally. The office is recognized for its innovation, agility, and focus on effective management. Among its portfolio during her tenure were programs in Afghanistan, Burma, Kenya, Libya, and Syria. Prior to joining the Obama Administration, she served as Chief of Staff for the Center on International Cooperation in New York City, where she was responsible for strategy, managing front office and administrative staff, raising core funds, and overseeing multiple technical/policy portfolios. Nealin has brought to these endeavors over 10 years of experience working on issues of poverty, health, and conflict with governments, non-governmental organizations, and think tanks, including the Carter Center, IFES, the Bobst Center on Peace and Justice, the Treatment Action Campaign, and the Brookings Institution. Nealin earned a Master’s in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School and a Bachelor of Arts in Religion from the University of Virginia. In 2013 she was selected as one of 20 inaugural participants in the President’s Leadership Group. She is a member of the International Society of Women Geographers and a Truman Fellow in National Security.
Sarah Holewinski
Sarah Holewinski previously serves in the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She was formerly deputy chief of staff for policy at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. For nearly a decade prior, she was executive director of Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), leading efforts to advise warring parties on civilian protection and responsible use of force. In that role, she worked extensively with the U.S. military and its allies and in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, CAR, Burma, and elsewhere. Sarah helped author U.S. doctrine on civilian harm mitigation, advised NATO on addressing civilian harm in Afghanistan and on civilian casualty prevention for Operation Unified Protector in Libya, advised the African Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), and created trainings on civilian protection for the United States, NATO, AMISOM, ANSF, and Burmese forces.
Sarah was named in Top 100 Most Influential People in Armed Violence Reduction by Action on Armed Violence and received the Truman National Security Project’s award for Extraordinary Impact. She was a member of the (Bill) Clinton Administration’s White House AIDS Policy team, a senior associate at West Wing Writers, and consulted for Human Rights Watch, Ford Foundation, and the William J. Clinton Foundation. Sarah holds degrees from Georgetown and Columbia Universities, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Dafna Hochman Rand
Dafna Hochman Rand is Vice President for Policy and Research at Mercy Corps. Rand most recently served as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) at the U.S. State Department, where she oversaw, designed and implemented diplomatic and programmatic strategies to advance human rights, civilian security and governance. In addition to representing the United States on diplomatic missions, Rand mobilized the U.S. interagency to achieve the 2016 White House Executive Order on civilian protection.
Prior to her role at DRL, Rand was a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and served on the National Security Council, in addition to working in policy think tanks. She has served two tours as a staff member in the U.S. Senate, where she worked on a range of national security, budgetary, trade and development issues. She has testified multiple times in front of key Senate and House committees.
Rand holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University’s Department of Political Science. She has published extensively on the political developments and international security issues related to the Middle East and North Africa.
Colin Kahl
Molly Kinder
Molly Kinder Molly Kinder is a senior advisor on Work, Workers and Technology as well as the New America National Network. She is also a fellow at Georgetown University's Beeck Center for Social Impact & Innovation and adjunct faculty at Georgetown's McCourt School of Public Policy, where she is teaching a graduate seminar on the social, economic and policy implications of AI. Kinder is leading human-centered research on workers' perspective on automation and their motivations and constraints to skills and opportunity.
Kinder has more than 15 years of experience in innovation, policy, economic development, research, and impact investing. Previously, Kinder was co-founder and vice president of a $200 million social impact fund. She served in the Obama administration as director in a new innovation program and was a policy director at the ONE campaign. She directed a Pakistan initiative at the Center for Global Development and co-authored the center's best-selling book, Millions Saved: Proven Successes in Global Health, which is required reading in more than 60 universities. Kinder worked overseas in Liberia in the government of Africa's first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and in India and Pakistan with the World Bank. Kinder served as a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Truman Security Fellow, and was ranked "Top 99 under 33" in foreign policy. Her media appearances include CNN, NPR, Al Jazeera, Voice of America, USA Today, Time Magazine and the Boston Globe. Kinder is an alum of the University of Notre Dame and has a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Haile Soifer
Halie Soifer is currently serving as National Security Advisor to Senator Kamala Harris (CA), advising on matters pertaining to foreign policy, defense, veterans, and cybersecurity. Previously, she served as foreign policy advisor and committee staff for three Members of Congress – Rep. Robert Wexler (FL), Sen. Ted Kaufman (DE), and Sen. Chris Coons (DE) – including serving as Senate Foreign Relations Africa Subcommittee Staff Director when Senator Coons served as Chairman from 2010 to 2014. Most recently, from 2014 to 2016, Halie served in the Obama Administration as Senior Policy Advisor for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, focusing on matters pertaining to Israeli-Palestinian issues, the budget, and Congress. In 2008, Halie served as the Florida Jewish Vote Director for the Obama Campaign. Halie received her Master’s degree from Johns Hopkins SAIS in Middle East studies and international economics, and Bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan.
Nina Hachigian
Nina Hachigian currently serves as Deputy Mayor for International Affairs for the city of Los Angeles. Hachigian was appointed U.S. Ambassador to ASEAN by former President Obama, and served in the post from 2014 to 2017 with the rank and status of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. During her tenure, the U.S. established a strategic partnership with ASEAN, held the first Leaders’ Summit in the United States, launched a presidential initiative on economic cooperation, established the U.S.-ASEAN Women’s Leadership Academy, and grew the youth program to over 100,000 members. She had previously served as director of the RAND Center for Asia Pacific Policy for four years, been Senior Vice President at the Center for American Progress, and was on the staff of the National Security Council in the Clinton White House from 1998 to 1999.
A founder of Women Ambassadors Serving America (WASA), Ambassador Hachigian holds a B.S. from Yale University and is a graduate of Stanford Law School. She is the editor of “Debating China: The U.S. – China Relationship in Ten Conversations” (Oxford University Press, 2014), and co-author of “The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise” (Simon & Schuster, 2008).
Colin Kahl
Colin H. Kahl is co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the inaugural Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a Professor, by courtesy, in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He is also a Strategic Consultant to the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.
From October
2014 to January 2017, he was Deputy Assistant to the President and National
Security Advisor to the Vice President. In that position, he served as a senior
advisor to President Obama and Vice President Biden on all matters related to
U.S. foreign policy and national security affairs, and represented the Office
of the Vice President as a standing member of the National Security Council
Deputies’ Committee. From February 2009 to December 2011, Dr. Kahl was the
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East at the Pentagon. In
this capacity, he served as the senior policy advisor to the Secretary of
Defense for Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Saudi
Arabia, Syria, Yemen, and six other countries in the Levant and Persian Gulf region.
In June 2011, he was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding
Public Service by Secretary Robert Gates.
From 2007 to 2017 (when not serving in the U.S. government), Dr. Kahl was an
assistant and associate professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown
University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. From 2007 to 2009 and
2012 to 2014, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American
Security (CNAS), a nonpartisan Washington, DC-based think tank. From 2000 to
2007, he was an assistant professor of political science at the University of
Minnesota. In 2005-2006, Dr. Kahl took leave from the University of Minnesota
to serve as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in the
Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he worked on issues related to
counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and responses to failed states. In
1997-1998, he was a National Security Fellow at the John M. Olin Institute for
Strategic Studies at Harvard University.
Current research projects include a book analyzing American grand strategy in
the Middle East in the post-9/11 era. A second research project focuses on the
implications of emerging technologies on strategic stability.
Tony Blinken
Tony Blinken is managing director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and the Herter/Nitze Distinguished Scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Tony has held senior foreign policy positions in two administrations over three decades—including Deputy Secretary of State in the Obama administration, the nation’s number two diplomat. Tony helped to lead diplomacy in the fight against ISIL, the rebalance to Asia, and the global refugee crisis, while building bridges to the innovation community. Before that, Tony served as Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama. He chaired the Deputies Committee, the administration’s principal forum for formulating foreign policy. During the first Obama term, he was National Security Advisor to Vice President Biden. Tony served as Democratic Staff Director for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2002 to 2008 and was a member of President Clinton’s National Security Council staff from 1994 to 2001.
Tony was a reporter for The New Republic magazine and has written widely about foreign policy. He is the author of Ally Versus Ally: America, Europe, and the Siberian Pipeline Crisis. He is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and a global affairs analyst for CNN.
Tony is a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Law School.
Pete Buttigieg – Mayor of South Bend Indiana A Rhodes Scholar, Buttigieg studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford and holds a bachelor’s degree in History and Literature from Harvard. Buttigieg was born in South Bend and grew up in the Northwest Side and North Shore Triangle neighborhoods. He attended St. Joseph High School in South Bend.
Buttigieg is past President of the Indiana Urban Mayors Caucus and the Northern Indiana Mayors Roundtable, and serves on the boards of the Truman National Security Project and the United States Conference of Mayors. In 2015 he received the New Frontier Award from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and the Harvard University Institute of Politics, and in 2016 he won the U.S. Department of Transportation Mayors’ Challenge Pedestrian and Bicycle Awards for the City’s work on Smart Streets.
Elected at the age of 29, Buttigieg has been profiled by the New York Times and was called “the most interesting mayor you’ve never heard of” by the Washington Post. An officer in U.S. Navy Reserve from 2009-17, Buttigieg took a leave of absence to serve in Afghanistan during a seven-month deployment in 2014, earning the Joint Service Commendation Medal for his counterterrorism work.
An active musician, Buttigieg plays piano and guitar, and has performed with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra. He lives in the same neighborhood where he grew up and is restoring a formerly vacant home there.
ROSE JACKSON
Rose Jackson is the co-founder and CEO of Rise Up. She was previously the senior policy advisor for the Secure Partnerships Initiative at the Open Society Foundations. Before joining Open Society, Jackson served as the chief of staff to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the U.S. Department of State. She also served as a foreign policy advisor to Senator Chris Coons as a Galloway Fellow. She has worked in key positions on several high-profile U.S. political campaigns.
Jackson served as a program officer at the National Democratic Institute in both Washington, D.C., and Nairobi, Kenya, and ran programs in Somalia and Uganda. In 2011, she served as an advisor and political analyst for the International Organization for Migration in Benghazi and Tripoli, Libya. She is a Truman National Security Project Fellow and directs its Africa expert group, and is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Jackson received an MA in international relations from the United States International University as a Rotary Scholar in Kenya and a BA in international relations and economics from Wheaton College in Massachusetts.
Julie Smith
Julie Smith Julianne (“Julie”) Smith is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and is currently serving as a Weizsäcker Fellow at the Bosch Academy in Berlin. She is the former Senior Fellow and Director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. She serves as a contributing editor to Foreign Policy, where she coedits “Shadow Government.”
From 2012-2013, she served as the Deputy National Security Advisor to the Vice President of the United States. In addition to advising the Vice President on a wide range of foreign and defense policy issues, she represented him in Cabinet and Deputies level interagency meetings. During March and April of 2013, she served as the Acting National Security Advisor to the Vice President.
Before her post at the White House, she served for three years as the Principal Director for European and NATO Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. In that capacity, Ms. Smith acted as the principal advisor to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs for all matters falling within the broad spectrum of NATO and European policy. Her office managed the Department’s bilateral relationships with 31 European countries. In January 2012, she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service.
Prior to joining the Obama administration, Ms. Smith directed the CSIS Europe Program and the Initiative for a Renewed Transatlantic Partnership, where she led the Center’s research and program activities on U.S.-European political, security, and economic relations. She authored or contributed to a number of CSIS books and reports, including Alliance Reborn: An Atlantic Compact for the 21st Century (2009), Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change (2008), Transforming NATO (…again) (2006), and America and the World in the Age of Terror (2005). She co-directed the Transatlantic Dialogue on Terrorism, which examined U.S.-European disagreements over the root causes of terrorism.
Earlier, Ms. Smith served as deputy director and senior fellow in the CSIS International Security Program, where she oversaw the management of more than 30 security-related projects and focused on a range of European security issues, including European defense integration, transatlantic cooperation on climate change, and EU-U.S. counterterrorism cooperation.
Ms. Smith has also worked at the German Marshall Fund, the Association of the U.S. Army on the Project on the Role of American Military Power, and the British American Security Information Council. In 1996/97, she worked in Germany at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik as a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow.
Ms. Smith is a recipient of the American Academy in Berlin Public Policy Fellowship and the Fredin Memorial Scholarship for study at the Sorbonne in Paris. She received her B.A. from Xavier University and her M.A. from American University. She spent a year learning German at the University of Munich. Ms. Smith serves on the Advisory Council of the Alliance for Security Democracy; the Board of Advisors of the Truman National Security Project; and the Board of Trustees of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. She is an advisor to Beacon Global Strategies. She is currently an Associate Fellow with Chatham House, home of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, in London, and a Senior Associate with the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Running for Congress – could have discussions before November as backup
Tom Malinowski
Tom Malinowski is running for Congress in New Jersey. He previously served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Previously, from 2001, he was Washington Director for Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading independent international organizations dedicated to defending and protecting human rights. From 1998 to 2001, he served as Senior Director on the National Security Council at the White House, where he oversaw the drafting of President Clinton’s foreign policy speeches and strategic communications efforts around the world. From 1994 to 1998 he was a speechwriter for Secretaries of State Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, and member of the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Malinowski worked as a research assistant for the Ford Foundation in 1993, and for the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, in 1992. He began his career as a Special Assistant for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1988. Mr. Malinowski received a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.Phil. from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
Lauren Baer
Lauren Baer is running for Congress in Florida. An attorney and foreign policy expert, Lauren served as an official in the Obama Administration from 2011-2017, acting as a senior advisor to Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, and to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power. During her time in government, she was responsible for ensuring that the promotion of U.S. values remained central to foreign policy and advised on a range of critical national security issues related to human rights and international law. With a reputation for strong management skills and success working across the aisle, Lauren also oversaw large-scale initiatives to make government work better, and to engage everyday people and businesses on U.S. foreign policy. Earlier in her career, Lauren was a litigator whose practice focused on international disputes and federal appeals. As an attorney committed to justice and fairness, she had an active pro bono practice that included taking the fight to get money out of politics all the way to the Supreme Court.
Elissa Slotkin
A former U.S. Department of Defense official has launched a campaign for the Democratic nomination in Michigan's 8th Congressional district, a seat currently held by U.S. Rep. Mike Bishop.
Elissa Slotkin, who served three tours in Iraq with the CIA before holding several positions with the U.S. State Department and the Department of Defense, announced her candidacy at a Monday morning campaign event in Lansing.
Slotkin's most recently served as a top adviser to two Secretaries of Defense on the Middle East, Europe and NATO, Russia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere. She recently moved back to her family's farm in Holly after 15 years holding several intelligence and national defense posts during the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.