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Capitol Hill Publication Profiles AIM Executive Forum Speaker

Posted on September 16, 2020

Editor’s Note – The following article appeared Tuesday in The Hill, a Washington news site focused on politics and public policy. Bruce Mehlman will speak next Friday at 8 am at the AIM Virtual Executive Forum.

For more than 10 years, Bruce Mehlman, a founder of Mehlman Castagnetti Rosen & Thomas, has been putting together quarterly slide decks and freely distributing them to clients, fellow lobbyists, the media and others looking for insider insight in D.C. But he says the Trump administration and coronavirus have brought on serious spikes in his readership.

“The Great Acceleration: How 2020’s Crises Are Bringing the Future Faster,” which was inspired by the protests surrounding the death of George Floyd, came out in July, and his next slide deck drops next month.

“How will this historically disruptive year impact the future?” Mehlman asked in a recent interview. “My takeaway is I think the deep recession combined with the pandemic, combined with the social unrest, combined with the intense election, is merely accelerating some trends that preexisted this year — and it even preexisted this president in some ways.”

In his “After COVID” report that came out in April, which was downloaded more than 115,000 times, Mehlman, who served as assistant secretary of Commerce for technology policy under former President George W. Bush, discussed the likely long-term impacts of the pandemic.

“Everybody was stuck at home, online, stressed about the future and lacking any live sports. So what else was there to do?” Mehlman said. “I’m not an epidemiologist. I can’t tell you the next economic steps. But trying to take a step back and think about the likely impact on politics and policy over a several-year period is, in some ways, easier than trying to understand the path of a disease in a several-week period.”

Learn More | The Hill

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