Mike McCurry (press Secretary) - Post-Clinton Career

Post-Clinton Career

McCurry serves on numerous boards or advisory councils for organizations including Share Our Strength, the Junior Statesmen Foundation, Children's Scholarship Fund, the Wesley Theological Seminary, United Methodist Communications and the White House Historical Association. He is co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates.

Those close to McCurry spoke highly of his famous dry humor, his competency, and his kindness as a person. He once responded to the Taco Liberty Bell incident by saying that the federal government was also "selling the Lincoln Memorial to Ford Motor Co. and renaming it the Lincoln-Mercury Memorial." He was well respected by the press corps during his tenure. However, his honesty and competency were not always appreciated by his colleagues. In 1998, he expressed doubts about Bill Clinton's fitness to remain in office.

Starting May 2005, McCurry was a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post. As of November, 2008, his most recent contribution was dated May, 2006. In December, 2008, McCurry contributed "How my party found God" to The Daily Beast. In the biographical blurb with the column, it was reported that he was a graduate student at Wesley Theological Seminary.

McCurry is a partner at the influential Washington, D.C. based government relations firm Public Strategies Washington, Inc. In 2006, in his position as co-chairman of Hands Off the Internet, he lobbied against Internet regulations in the controversial network neutrality debate.

On April 15, 2009 it was announced that McCurry and George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer would both work as temporary media aides to Conservative Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper. The two aides were enlisted by the PMO to elevate Harper's and Canada's profiles with American news outlets.

In a later round of the network neutrality fight, in 2011, McCurry came out in favor of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)/Protect IP Act, representing them as a way to combat theft on-line. In an opinion piece in Politico on the subject, which drew a favorable comment from the MPAA, McCurry said the new proposals addressed concerns of past critics. On June 15, 2011, McCurry and Arts + Labs co-chair Mark McKinnon sponsored the "CREATE -- A Forum on Creativity, Commerce, Copyright, Counterfeiting and Policy" conference with members of Congress, artists and information-business executives.