Panel on the Presidential Election

Christopher Lydon

Christopher Lydon is the host of Radio Open Source, a conversation on arts, ideas, and politics from Brown University's Watson Institute. Lydon is a former journalist with The New York Times, and anchored The Ten-O'Clock News on WGBH in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the original host of The Connection, produced by WBUR and syndicated to other NPR stations.

Juliette Kayyem

Juliette Kayyem, the national security and foreign policy columnist for the Boston Globe and Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, has spent nearly 15 years in counterterrorism, homeland security and emergency management arena. She most recently served for President Obama as Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security.

Ms. Kayyem was a congressional appointee to the National Commission on Terrorism which, in early summer 2001, highlighted major gaps in planning and preparation for a possible terrorist attack. She is the co-author of the critically acclaimed Protecting Liberty in an Age of Terror as well as the author and editor of numerous books and articles, including First to Arrive: State and Local Responses to Terrorism. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Until she re-entered public service, Ms. Kayyem served as an on air analyst for NBC and MSNBC News.

Stephen Oleskey

Stephen Oleskey is a partner in the Litigation and Real Estate Departments at WilmerHale. Mr. Oleskey has twice argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as before the Massachusetts Appeals Court; the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court; the New Hampshire Supreme Court and the First, Third, and Ninth Circuit US Courts of Appeals.

After 19 years at WilmerHale, Mr. Oleskey left in 1987 to serve as Massachusetts deputy attorney general and chief of the Public Protection Bureau. In that capacity, he managed 140 attorneys, investigators, paralegals and support personnel in the Antitrust, Civil Rights, Consumer Protection, Environmental Protection, Insurance, Public Charities, Utilities, Nuclear Safety and Special Litigation Divisions. He was responsible for all civil litigation and enforcement proceedings in these divisions, and coordinated their activities with the attorney general’s Criminal Bureau.

Theda Skocpol

Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. At Harvard, she has served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and as Director of the Center for American Political Studies. Skocpol's work covers a broad spectrum of topics including both comparative politics (States and Social Revolutions) and American politics (Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States). Among her other works are Bringing the State Back In, Social Policy in the United States, and Boomerang: Clinton's Health Security Effort and the Turn Against Government in US Politics.