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Jonathan Cowan
President
Jonathan Cowan is the President and co-founder of Third Way, the nation’s leading moderate think tank. He is a long-time leader in progressive policy and politics. A veteran of both the Clinton administration and Capitol Hill, Mr. Cowan served as Chief of Staff to then-Secretary (now New York Governor) Andrew Cuomo at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he managed a staff of more than 9,000 and oversaw an annual budget of $27 billion. Prior to his service at HUD, Mr. Cowan was a senior congressional staffer for then-Representative Mel Levine (D-CA).
Outside of government, Mr. Cowan has made a career as an ideas entrepreneur, leading Third Way since its inception in 2005. Before that, he launched, built and ran Americans for Gun Safety, which defined a new middle ground on the divisive gun issue, focused on both gun rights and responsible gun laws. And when he was still in his early 20s, Mr. Cowan co-founded Lead…or Leave, the seminal Generation X advocacy group which registered hundreds of thousands of college students to vote. Mr. Cowan has also served as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, where he taught courses on advocacy and youth politics.
Mr. Cowan is the co-author of Revolution X: A Survival Guide for Our Generation. His ideas and op-eds have been published widely, and he is a regular contributor to The Washington Post’s “On Leadership” series and POLITICO’s “Arena” section. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Mr. Cowan offers frequent commentary on policy, politics and leadership in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, on cable and broadcast television, NPR and elsewhere.
Third Way’s work has had a significant impact the nation’s policy and political debates, which are often defined by the rigid or outdated orthodoxies of both the left and right. Third Way offers policy and political solutions that discard the false choices presented by both sides. It fosters the most effective and emergent approaches to major problems – ones that can attract the plurality of citizens who represent the political center and whose support is critical to winning the war of ideas.
Third Way’s impact on the debate has prompted The New York Times to note that the organization “has become a constant presence in Washington.” POLITICO’s Mike Allen wrote that Third Way is “the moderate voice of the progressive movement.” And Greg Easterbrook of The Atlantic observed that Third Way “is rapidly emerging as Washington’s most important beyond-ideology think tank.”
© 2012 Third Way
