American politics can feel bewildering and beyond explanation. Lara M. Brown has spent her career proving otherwise. Lara is a political scientist and author tracing the long arc of American history from the nation's founding era to the character of modern presidents, to help make sense of today's political moment. Her work spans the sweep of American political history, from the founding era to the present, and always returns to the same animating question: what does politics reveal about who we really are?
That conviction animates her scholarship. Her newest book, Jefferson's Landmark Deal: The Politics of the Louisiana Purchase (University of Kansas Press, 2025), explores how Thomas Jefferson's skilled diplomacy and political strategy secured one of the most consequential bargains in American history — and what it reveals about the nature of presidential power and political leadership. It joins a body of work that includes Amateur Hour: Presidential Character and the Question of Leadership (Routledge, 2020) and Jockeying for the American Presidency: The Political Opportunism of Aspirants (Cambria Press, 2010), which trace how presidential ambition and character have shaped American democracy across generations. She has also co-edited The Presidential Leadership Dilemma: Between the Constitution and a Political Party (SUNY Press, 2013) and Campaigning for President 2016: Strategy and Tactics (Routledge, 2017), and contributed chapters to major volumes including The Presidency and the Political System (CQ Press) and Hatred of American Presidents (ABC-CLIO, 2018). Her peer-reviewed work has appeared in Congress and the Presidency, Presidential Studies Quarterly, American Politics Research, and the Journal of Political Marketing.
Dr. Brown brings that same historical grounding to public life. She currently serves as Senior Policy Advisor to the Center on Civility and Democracy at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, where she developed and leads a civic initiative that applies the principles of sportsmanship — respect, integrity, and rule-bound competition — to American democratic life. The initiative reflects her conviction that democracy, like athletics, depends not just on the rules themselves but on a shared culture of honoring them.
A frequent presence in national media, she has appeared on several dozen television and radio programs as an expert on elections, candidate strategy, political scandal, and presidential leadership. She has written more than a hundred op-eds and essays for such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, U.S. News & World Report, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Huffington Post. She has also provided strategic advice to political advocacy groups and non-profits.
Her path to this work was anything but conventional. Prior to serving as a political appointee in President William J. Clinton's administration at the U.S. Department of Education, she worked as both a political fundraiser and an academic development officer in California. Those years in politics and the private sector gave her an insider's understanding of power that sharpens her scholarship. After a few years of working as an education policy consultant in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, she returned to academia, eventually serving as a professor and the director of the Graduate School of Political Management (GSPM) at the George Washington University — a role in which she oversaw four master's degree programs, coordinated roughly $3 million in fundraising, and steered the school into one of the university's most media-visible units. Prior to relocating to the nation's capital, she also served as an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University.
Dr. Brown earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in political science from UCLA, and a separate M.A. in American politics and public policy from the University of Arizona. A California native, she grew up racing sailboats on the San Francisco Bay. She plays tennis, is a novice golfer, and has become an avid Padres fan. She divides her time between San Diego and Washington, D.C., where she lives with her husband.
