David Keene's Biography

Since December 1984, David A. Keene has been the chairman of the American Conservative Union, the nation’s oldest and largest grassroots conservative lobbying organization. He is also a managing associate at the Carmen Group, a lobbying firm in Washington, DC. Keene attended the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he was the National Chairman of Young Americans for Freedom. Since then, has been a John F. Kennedy Fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, a First Amendment Fellow at Vanderbilt University’s Freedom Forum, a member of the Board of Visitors at Duke University’s Public Policy School, and a member of the Board of Directors at the National Rifle Association. Keene’s involvement in presidential politics extends back to the Nixon Administration, where he served as a Special Assistant to Vice President Spiro Agnew. His Capitol Hill experience includes such varied roles as Executive Assistant to New York Senator Jim Buckley; Southern Regional Political Director for Ronald Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign; National Political Director for George Bush’s 1980 presidential race; Senior Advisor to former Senator Bob Dole in 1988 and advisor to Dole’s presidential campaign in 1996. Keene is recognized as one of the chief spokesmen for conservative principles and politics. Accordingly, he is regularly featured on a variety of radio, television and print media, and has written for publications such as National Review, the Washington Times and the Boston Globe. He is also a columnist for the Hill, a newspaper covering Congress.