Jeff Bell (politician)

Bell worked as an aide to Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and to U.S. Representative Jack Kemp of New York.

In the 1968 presidential election, Bell was working on the Nixon presidential campaign. On the evening of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination after the California primary, Bell happened to be the only staffer on hand at the Nixon campaign headquarters and made the phone call to the former vice-president's senior staff to notify them of Senator Kennedy's shooting.[2]

In 1975, Bell was responsible for a speech given by Ronald Reagan when he was running against President Gerald Ford in the Republican presidential primaries. In it, Reagan proposed a "systematic transfer of authority and resources to the states - a program of creative federalism for America's third century. Federal authority has clearly failed to do the job. Indeed, it has created more problems in welfare, education, housing, food stamps, Medicaid, community and regional development, and revenue sharing, to name a few. The sums involved and the potential savings to the taxpayer are large. Transfer of authority in whole or part in all of these areas would reduce the outlay of the federal government by more than $90 billion, using the spending levels of fiscal 1975. With such a savings it would be possible to balance the federal budget, make an initial $5 billion payment on the national debt and cut the federal personal income tax of every American by an average of 23 percent."

Bell's speech was intended to provide Reagan with a philosophical edge over President Ford. The Ford campaign, however, seized on it as evidence that in primary states like New Hampshire, which pay no state sales tax or income tax, that the state would have to come up with its own funds for programs. Reagan lost the New Hampshire primary to Ford, and the Bell policy was interpreted by some as a contributing factor.

In 1980, Bell produced and co-wrote the television commercials used by the Reagan presidential campaign in New Hampshire and subsequent primaries. The commercials, which focused on Reagan's policy to fight inflation by lowering taxes, were highly effective in boosting Reagan's popularity in the primary polls.[7]

In The Reagan Revolution (Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, 1981), the effectiveness of these commercials is addressed:

It is no exaggeration to say that those Curson-Bell spots... were indispensable to Reagan's solution of his basic political and ideological problems–a solution necessary for him to win the presidency.[8]

Bell was elected as a Reagan delegate from New Jersey to the Republican National Convention in 1980. As deputy chairman of the pro-Reagan group Citizens for America, Bell was actively involved in the passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986.

In addition to his work on the 1980 Reagan campaign, Bell was on the national campaign staff for Richard Nixon in 1968 and Reagan in 1976. In 1988, Bell served as the national campaign coordinator for Kemp for President and in 2000 he worked as a senior consultant to Gary Bauer's short-lived presidential campaign.

In February 2014 Bell rented a home in Leonia, New Jersey and announced he would run for the Republican nomination to challenge incumbent Democratic Senator Cory Booker, running on an anti-Federal Reserve and populist platform.[9][10] He narrowly won a four-way Republican primary on June 3, 2014, securing the nomination. Some of his promises are to restore the prosperity of the middle class by restoring the value of the dollar and not the value of the gold. By giving education that children deserve, promote legal immigration.[11] Jeff Bell lost to Cory Booker in a 42.4% to 55.8% percentage vote respectively, approximately the same percentages as in the 1978 Bell-Bradley Senate race 36 years earlier. The popular vote results were 1,016,204 for Cory Booker and 772,991 for Jeff Bell.