Partners
ADVISOR
SHORT BIO
Steve Baldwin is a former California State Assemblyman and the former Executive Director of the Council for National Policy and Young Americans for Freedom. He has been published in numerous publications and is the author of From Crayons to Condoms, The Ugly Truth about America’s Public Schools. He and his wife Patti and their four sons live in Santee, California, outside of San Diego.
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Steve Baldwin is a veteran leader at every level from local grassroots political organization to national networking among the most prominent political leaders, as well as an author, pundit and political consultant. As Executive Director of the Council for National Policy (2001-2009) he worked with many of America’s leading conservative figures and interacted with the national media. Elected to the California Assembly (1994-2000) he was quickly appointed Chairman of the Education Committee, the youngest in California history, and rose to become Minority Whip of the California Assembly. Like many other Fellows of the Inter-American Institute, his life’s work has immersed him at times in strategic projects that took for granted the urgency of the United States’ relationships and responsibilities throughout its own hemisphere.
His tireless passion for renewal of American culture and government goes back to his youth. After graduating from Pepperdine (Journalism and Public Relations) in December of 1979 he quickly took a position of national responsibility, moving to Washington D.C. to help organize College Republicans for Ronald Reagan. The Reagan Revolution was already in full swing and thousands of college kids were becoming active in the GOP. Hardly older than they, his job was to educate them about conservative philosophy and turn them into effective political activists. He taught students how to start alternative conservative newspapers, challenge their liberal professors, and engage in street theatre as a way of educating others.
After a few years with the College Republicans, he was asked by William F. Buckley and a group of prominent Young Americans for Freedom alumni to take over YAF as the once revered organization was on the verge of collapse. He agreed to serve a two-year term (January 2005- December 2006) as Executive Director of this historic group and was able to bring this organization back to life.
During this time he also raised funds for the Nicaraguan freedom fighters resisting the Soviet-backed Sandinista regime there. When the Democrats in Washington decided to collaborate with the Soviet ambitions in Latin America by cutting off congressional funding to the freedom fighters, Baldwin, along with many others, raised private funds to keep their resistance alive. They were successful, and for the first time in Cold War history, the Soviet empire experienced a setback when the resistance finally pressured the Sandinistas to agree to free elections, elections the Communists ultimately lost — at a decisive point in history.
Mr. Baldwin returned to San Diego in 1988 and ran for the 77th State Assembly District against a Democrat incumbent. He lost but shortly thereafter, he met his wife Patti and they were married in 1989. He ran again for the same assembly seat in 1992 and lost that race as well. During this period he also worked as a political consultant, helping numerous conservatives win races at all levels of government. In 1994 Baldwin ran again for the state legislature and this time defeated an entrenched Democrat incumbent.
Appointed almost immediately as Chairman of the state legislature’s Education Committee, he made and left a mark. As the first conservative to chair that committee in at least 40 years he led the charge on monumental education reforms such as creating a state wide assessment tests, state-wide academic standards, and a return to phonics instruction for the lower grades to reverse decades of educational decline under catastrophic leftist “progressive” experimentation on California children.
Despite the best efforts of the heavily funded unions, Baldwin won all his reelections by landslides. Over the course of six years in the legislature, Steve amassed a perfect record on pro-family, pro-taxpayer and constitutional issues such as the 2nd Amendment. Needless to say, he received many threats from the left.
In January, 2001 he returned to national political affairs in Washington, when asked to serve as Executive Director of Council for National Policy, the nation’s leading networking group for conservative leaders, described by some as the conservative counterpart to the Council for Foreign Relations and “the headquarters of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy.
In January of 2009, having seen the CNP through two presidential elections and many major battles on every political front, Baldwin returned to San Diego where he works on various writing projects and has resumed his work as a political consultant specializing in grassroots mobilization.
He is the author of The Revolution Lobby (1985), about how the American left collaborated with the Soviet Union to manipulate public opinion during the Cold War years, and From Crayons to Condoms (2009), a strong and telling critique of America’s public school system, which reached #1 in the “political books” category on Amazon.com.
Baldwin writes for magazines, newspapers and blogs and has been interviewed on radio and television programs such as Hannity and Colmes. He is a Senior Fellow with the Western Center for Journalism where he writes investigative pieces on the Obama regime, focusing on the threat Obama poses to the United States Constitution.
While Mr. Baldwin has worked with the movers and shakers of the Washington and Sacramento political establishment and media elites, using his “laid back” California style, he has never lost his deadly earnestness about what is good and right for America and her neighbors and considers perhaps his greatest accomplishment of his career that he is acknowledged by friend and foe alike as deeply principled about politics, down to earth and incorruptible.
Baldwin has been married for twenty years and has four boys. He currently lives in the San Diego area. His four boys are avid inline and ice hockey players. He had the honor of coaching the national U14 and U12 roller hockey teams for the Jr. Olympic Committee. His oldest son is a professional in the North American Hockey League.