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Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets and heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, has raised millions for John McCain’s presidential campaign.
As Michael Luo of the New York Times described in a story today, Johnson shared a skybox at the Xcel Energy Center with Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager. He was the only fund-raiser with his name emblazoned on his own hospitality suite, the “Woody Johnson Minneapolis-St. Paul 2008 Host Committee Private Lounge.”
And Luo describes how on Tuesday evening, before the convention really got going, Johnson was among a cluster of McCain campaign officials and supporters hovering outside a suite guarded by an aide.
As Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard and senior McCain adviser, chatted in one small circle, Mr. Johnson, 61, was at the center of another next to her, before he disappeared inside the suite with Mr. Davis.
Johnson told Luo that he only takes on candidates and causes he really believes in.
Earlier this year, for instance, he made as many as 50 calls a day, organizing a New York City fund-raiser for McCain that brought in $7 million in a single evening. He did that in part by importuning some of his billionaire buddies, among them real-estate mogul Donald Trump and David Koch, co-owner of Koch Industries.
Like many of McCain’s biggest supporters, Johnson has long been a player in Republican politics. He was a Bush Ranger in 2000 and 2004, raising more than $200,000 in each election, according to the Times.
By all accounts, he has used his influence to advance his philanthropic, as much as business interests, pushing for more federal funding for research, for instance, for juvenile diabetes and lupus, which afflict two of his daughters, for instance. But there’s also little doubt his access has helped him as the owner of the Jets and his search for a new stadium for the team.
Still Johnson played down the significance of his access to McCain.
The prime-time acceptance speech to be delivered tonight by Republican presidential nominee John McCain has been crafted by a man described as the candidate’s best friend, as well as his Boswell.
For two decades, Mark Salter has made channeling McCain’s voice his life’s work. He co-authored five books with the Arizona senator (and split the proceeds 50-50), including the best-selling memoir, Faith of Our Fathers. He has also been McCain’s speechwriter, adviser and closest confidante, surviving countless campaign shake-ups.
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“The only person closer to McCain is his wife,” said former senator Warren Rudman, a longtime friend to both men.
From the very start, McCain’s history as a former prisoner of war was part of his political brief. He was first elected to Congress as a war hero beneath the slogan “a name Arizonans are talking about.”
But it was Salter who distilled and refined the narrative.
“Salter has transformed his boss into a character worthy of literature, enlivening his inner conflicts and drawing out his motivations,” wrote Sasha Issenberg of the Boston Globe. “Salter has given the blunt McCain a new voice as a reflective narrator of his own actions – made evident in the “imperfect servant” line, in which our protagonist earns our trust by acknowledging his flaw.”
In Faith of My Fathers, published in 1999 during his first presidential campaign, McCain’s release from prison became a revelatory moment:
“I had remembered a dying man’s legacy to his son,” McCain wrote, “and when I needed it most, I had found my freedom abiding in it.”
That theme – of discovering individual purpose through a “cause greater than self-interest” – became central to McCain’s narrative.
Besides getting McCain better than anyone, Salter has also demonstrated “a one-of-a-kind instinct for how to craft McCain’s public image,” wrote Michael Crowley of the New Republic.
“Over the years, he has taken the raw material of McCain’s biography and temperament and turned it into a compelling narrative that supersedes politics–one about an independent-minded war hero who celebrates courage and humility, demands individual sacrifice, and excoriates vanity.”
A burly, chain-smoker, Salter met McCain for the first time in the mid-1980s and immediately hit it off with him.
He had grown up in Davenport, Iowa, the son of a Korean War veteran, who apparently shared McCain’s gruff modesty. “People write about how McCain is unnecessarily modest,” Salter told Salon in 1999. “But it’s perfectly consistent with the way my father talked about his war experience.”
Salter’s unusual life story also appealed to McCain. After a long rebellious streak working on railroads and singing in a rock band, Salter had gone to night school, ultimately graduating from Georgetown University.
Drawn to politics, he got a job writing speeches for UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and got to know McCain’s press secretary who invited him to do some freelance work for the senator.
The two men immediately struck up a friendship. Within four years, Salter had been elevated to McCain’s chief of staff. Salter also eventually married McCain’s former scheduler, Diane, with whom he has two daughters.
By all accounts, Salter is fiercely loyal. He once wrestled a critic of the senator to the floor outside his office and held him until the police came.
And last summer, with McCain’s campaign sinking in the polls and running out of money, the senator let go his top managers. The day after the shake-up, he talked to Salter about the future. Salter assured the senator that he was “a McCain guy,” and that he would do whatever the senator wanted, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Now, in a hotly contested election, Salter faces his greatest challenge to date – to sell his candidate as the real agent of change. The speech he reportedly labored over all summer will purportedly spotlight McCain’s moments of self-sacrifice, including his refusal of early release from captivity in Vietnam, and his decision to challenge his own party over campaign-finance reform.
The contrast, he says, will be the “selfishness” of “self-interested” political partisans who, he argues, have risked nothing of substance in their lives.
“Obviously I’ve got to get this one right,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin portrays herself as a traditional wife and mother, in addition to a rising star in Alaska politics, who has successfully balanced her myriad responsibilities.
But tension between her familial and gubernatorial roles is at the heart of one of the more contentious questions dogging the GOP vice-presidential candidate back home: Did she try to use her power as governor to settle a family score by pressuring a top state official to fire her ex-brother-in-law, a state trooper then involved in a bitter custody fight with her sister?
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A bipartisan panel of the state legislature is investigating that question, and also, whether Palin subsequently fired former Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan when he refused to comply with her request to get rid of her ex-brother-in-law Mike Wooten.
The panel was slated to release its findings about what the Alaska media have been calling “Troopergate” at the end of October, only days before Election Day.
Now, in what appears to be a bid to slow down the probe, if not derail it, a private lawyer hired to represent Palin has challenged the authority of state lawmakers to look into ethics questions. Instead, the lawyer, Thomas V. Van Flein, contends the probe should be handled by the state Personnel Board, which he says is “statutorily mandated” to handle ethics cases. The three-member Personnel Board is appointed by the governor.
Van Flein is also making it difficult for the retired state prosecutor charged with conducting the probe to interview Palin. Van Flein said the investigation is “bad timing” in the middle of a presidential campaign.
Palin had initially denied that she had pressured Monegan to fire Wooten. She said she had simply raised questions about Wooten, relaying the allegation that he made a death threat against her father.
But later this summer, she acknowledged becoming aware that her husband, Todd Palin, and several members of her administration had made calls about Wooten to various state officials. In a TV interview in July, Todd Palin confirmed he had talked with Monegan, but said he was just “informing” him about Wooten, not pressuring him.
A four-page backgrounder put out Monday by the McCain/Palin campaign says that Todd Palin, and members of Palin’s staff had made inquiries “about the appropriate Department of Public Safety procedures for dealing with someone they considered a dangerous person and rogue trooper.”
Monegan, however, believes that his firing in July was related to his refusal to remove Wooten. He also turned over several emails that he said he received from Palin about Wooten.
The hiring of Van Flein, an attorney with the Anchorage law firm of Clapp, Peterson, Van Flein, Tiemessen & Thorsness, apparently occurred two weeks ago, but was disclosed Friday by the Legislature’s investigating committee.
His work started Aug. 21, and he is being paid $185 an hour, lower than his usual rate, to represent Palin and others in the governor’s office, according to the Anchorage Daily News. He is authorized to spend up to $95,000.
Van Flein has represented the Palin family in the past as a private attorney, according to a McCain aide who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
But the lawyer himself declined to verify that citing attorney-client privilege. “Did I know the Palins before the state hired me? Yes,” he told The Associated Press.
“The governor of every state gets legal counsel, and this attorney is part of a weeks-old effort to provide this governor defense in a series of outlandish, politically motivated charges,” said senior McCain adviser Tucker Eskew. “It is a matter of her job and is not recent, and it is not related to her selection on the McCain-Palin ticket.”
Here is the affadavit filed by Van Flein requesting the inquiry be handled by the state Personnel Board. Here is his press release about it.
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Since then, he has focused and juiced up McCain’s ads, in one case depicting Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, as a celebrity in the tradition of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.
And for the last few days, he’s been backstage at the Republican National Convention, altering and compressing the script to reflect concern about Hurricane Gustav.
As it turned out, Gustav did not strike New Orleans with the anticipated force, but Davis was still left with the job of managing what had become a shorter convention.
He also has been working on a video introducing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain’s surprise pick as his vice-presidential running mate. The video, to be shown today, will be narrated by the actor Jon Voight.
Davis was familiar with Palin, having produced ads for her successful 2006 gubernatorial campaign.
But this time around, he has had to deal with the attention generated by the announcement that Palin’s oldest daughter, Bristol, is pregnant and unmarried.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Davis is a somewhat unconventional figure at the convention, where the suits generally wear suits.
“Mr. Davis – with his feathered and graying long hair, jeans and black linen shirt and nickname ‘Hollywood’ – could be mistaken for a band member of his friend Joe Cocker.”
A native of Oklahoma, Davis, 56, dropped out of college and took over his father’s three-man advertising agency when the elder Davis died.
He grew the company that became Davis & Matos, Inc., eventually moving it to California and renaming it Strategic Perception Inc.
The company has had a wide variety of corporate clients including The Famous Amos Chocolate Chip Cookie Company and the Associated Funeral Directors Service Corporation.
In 1994, Davis took on his first political campaign, helping his uncle, Republican James Inhofe, win election to the U.S. Senate from Oklahoma.
Davis and his company have since worked on many Republican campaigns, including the 2004 re-election of George W. Bush and the 2006 re-election of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
His campaign ads are sometimes marked by humor and/or pointed satire.
In 2002, he helped Sonny Perdue become governor of Georgia by creating an ad that suggested Perdue’s opponent, the incumbent governor, was a giant rat roaming the state.
Davis is also adept at suggesting an opponent’s strength is a liability, as in the Obama “celebrity” ad that tries to undercut the enormous attention drawn by Obama in Europe.
Sen. Joseph Biden may boast that he takes Amtrak home to Delaware every night, but his younger son, Robert Hunter Biden, appears to be a creature of the Washington establishment.
“Hunter,” as friends and family call him, is a 38-year-old lawyer whose work as a lobbyist and a hedge fund principal has created some awkward moments for the elder Biden, just as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee is emphasizing his working-class origins and how he has tackled moneyed interests on behalf of ordinary Americans.
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Hunter Biden, the second son of Biden and his late wife, Neilia, served in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps after graduating from Georgetown University. Right out of Yale Law School, he landed a job with financial services giant MBNA, the largest employer in Delaware and a major contributor to his father’s campaigns.
After stints as a presidential appointee in Bill Clinton’s Commerce Department and a consultant for MBNA, he went into business with William Oldaker, a former Federal Election Commission counsel and longtime adviser and fund-raiser for his father.
Oldaker, Biden & Belair, LLP made $1.7 million in the first six months of this year, and is registered to represent clients including the government of the Northern Mariana Islands, the National Association of Shareholders & Consumer Attorneys and a number of colleges and hospitals.
Biden’s clients reported paying the company $470,000 so far this year, according to the analysis by USA Today.
It is not illegal for a member of Congress to have a relative in the lobbying profession. At least 24 House members and 31 senators had relatives registered as lobbyists in the 2002, 2004 and 2006 election cycles, according to research by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal watchdog group.
But the reports about Hunter Biden’s business activities are particularly sensitive at a time when presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama has vowed to reduce the influence of special interest groups on policymaking and barred contributions from lobbyists.
The Washington Post, for instance, documented how the younger Biden sought help from Obama’s staff to secure earmarks for several of his Illinois clients, including a college nursing program and a hospital.
The paper reported that Hunter Biden got the cooperation of Obama’s office to win $190,000 in federal funds for St. Xavier University, a four-year, 5,600-student institution run by the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy in suburban Chicago.
Biden also sought help from Obama’s staff to get funding for Chicago’s Thorek Memorial Hospital. In 2006, Obama asked for $2 million for a cancer research treatment center there, according to a letter requesting the money posted on Obama’s campaign website. Hunter Biden was the registered lobbyist and his firm was paid $120,000 for representing Thorek, which has not received funding, according to the Post.
Obama spokesman David Wade told the Post that Hunter Biden never appealed directly to the senator.
“Hunter Biden met with the Obama Senate office, not with Senator Obama,” Wade said. “It’s hardly surprising that a senator from Illinois would fight for investments in Mercy Hospital, Thorek Hospital and St. Xavier University right in Illinois, or that he’d be joined in that effort by a Republican colleague, Representative Judy Biggert.”
Prior to working for Oldaker, Hunter Biden was the senior vice president and then a consultant for credit card company MBNA Corp.
From 2001 to 2005, he was paid an undisclosed amount by the company, which has since been purchased by Bank of America.
Those were the same years that his father was helping the credit card industry win passage of a law making it harder for consumers to file for bankrupty protection – a law opposed by Obama and which was finally passed in 2005.
Obama aides told the New York Times that Hunter Biden had never lobbied for MBNA and that there was nothing improper about the consulting payments.
Besides his lobbying and consulting work, Hunter Biden is also chairman of a New York-based hedge fund group, called Paradigm Global Advisers, which faces lawsuits from a former business partner, a former investor, and a former executive, all of whom claim they were defrauded. Besides Hunter Biden, his uncle, James Biden, is a principal in Paradigm.
In one lawsuit, former investor Anthony Lotito contends that James Biden called him in January, 2006, asking him to arrange a job for Hunter Biden because of Joseph Biden’s concerns that his son’s lobbying career might hurt his bid for the White House.
Lotito provides no evidence of the senator’s involvement in the court papers, however. Hunter and James Biden countersued, accusing their former partner defrauded them by misrepresenting his experience in the hedge fund industry and recommending that they hire a lawyer with felony convictions.
In an affidavit, Hunter Biden said his father had nothing to do with the deal and that it is Lotito who swindled the Bidens.
The campaign of Sens. Barack Obama and Biden declined to discuss the case with reporters, referring questions to Nicholas Gravante Jr., a lawyer representing Hunter and James Biden. Gravante told the Washington Post that assertions that Joseph Biden told his brother he was concerned about his son’s lobbying are “absolutely false.”
Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska since 2006, is John McCain’s choice for his vice-presidential running mate.
The selection is considered a potentially high-risk, but also high-reward gamble to woo conservatives, as well as female voters who may still feel alienated by Barack Obama’s defeat of Hillary Clinton.
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While relatively inexperienced as a politician, Palin, 44, is a bona-fide conservative with a compelling life story. A mother of five, she has one son who will deploy to Iraq next month as an Army infantryman, and a four-month-old infant with Down syndrome.
She is also a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association and an opponent of abortion, whose pick is expected to reassure the evangelical base of the Republican party.
In a rousing introduction, Palin portrayed herself as a reform-minded governor of Alaska who has challenged the party’s old guard, attacked pork-barrel spending and taken a strong interest in energy issues.
“I stood up to the special interests, the lobbyists, the oil companies and the good old boy network,” she said, noting she had turned down federal funding for the “bridge to nowhere,” a project championed by two Republican congressmen from Alaska that became a symbol of wasteful spending.
Sarah Palin
Expectations had been that McCain would choose a more experienced politician. High on the list of potential VP candidates were Minnesota Gov. Tom Pawlenty, failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney, former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge and Sen. Joe Lieberman.
But picking a woman from outside the beltway could pay dividends with voters looking for confirmation that McCain is a maverick determined to change politics as usual. It also gives the McCain campaign the ability to claim that it, too, is potentially historic.
Palin went out of her way to invoke the precedents set by Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman on a Democratic presidential ticket, as well by Clinton, saying she had left “18 million cracks” in the highest glass ceiling in the land.
Then, making a direct appeal to Clinton’s supporters, she said, “It turns out that the women in America aren’t finished yet, and we can shatter that glass ceiling.”
The down side of the selection, however, is that by putting a first-term governor on the ticket, GOP attacks on Obama’s youth and inexperience may now ring hollow.
In addition, McCain and Palin have disagreed on energy policy, an issue that will play a major role in the general election. As governor of Alaska, Palin supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Earlier this week, The Weekly Standard described her as “the nation’s most prominent advocate” of drilling in the wildlife refuge that environmentalists see as one of America’s most precious natural wilderness areas.
McCain, who recently reversed his position on offshore drilling, had long opposed oil exploration in the wildlife refuge.
In her first remarks on a national stage, however, Palin stressed their shared belief in the need to challenge the status quo. “This is a moment when principle and political independence matter a lot more than the party line,” she said.
The daughter of a science teacher and school secretary, Palin is a former Miss Alaska runnerup, who holds a degree in journalism from the University of Idaho. She describes herself as “a hockey mom,” who initially got involved in politics through the PTA.
Palin served two terms on the city council of Wasilla, a suburb of Anchorage, AK, from 1992 to 1996, was elected mayor in 1996, and ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 2002.
After charging then-Republican Gov. Frank Murkowski with misconduct, she won election in 2006, by defeating the incumbent governor in the Republican primary, and then a former Democratic governor in the general election.
Details of Palin’s personal life have contributed to her own image as a political maverick. She hunts, eats moose hamburger, ice fishes, rides snowmobiles, and owns a float plane.
Her husband, Todd, is a commercial fisherman and, she noted in her introduction, “a proud member of the United Steelworkers union.” Outside the fishing season, he works for BP at an oil field on the North Slope and is a champion snowmobiler, winning the 2,000-mile Iron Dog race four times.
The couple have three daughters: Bristol, 17, Willow, 13, and Piper, 7. Three days after giving birth to her second son, Trig Paxson Van Palin, on April 18th, she returned to the office.
As governor, Palin is facing a state investigation related to her firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan who alleged that his removal was due in part to his reluctance to fire an Alaska state trooper, Mike Wooten, who had been involved in a divorce and child custody battle with Palin’s sister, Molly McCann.
Palin disputes that charge, asserting Monegan was dismissed for not filling state trooper vacancies, and because he “did not turn out to be a team player on budgeting issues.”
In a prepared statement yesterday, the Obama campaign portrayed Palin as an ideologue without the experience to govern.
“Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency,” said campaign spokesman Bill Burton. “Governor Palin shares John McCain’s commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush’s failed economic policies – that’s not the change we need, it’s just more of the same.”
To hear McCain’s introduction of Palin, click here:
The idea is to make fat-cat funders think twice before underwriting attack ads against Democratic candidates and causes.
But whether a new group’s promise to go after such benefactors with legal action and potentially embarrassing publicity will discourage them from signing the big checks remains to be seen.
“We want to stop the Swift Boating before it gets off the ground,” said Tom Matzzie, a liberal political operative who formed Accountable America earlier this month.
The idea of the new nonprofit is to warn donors to conservative groups that they will face legal and even personal consequences, in the form of ads identifying their handiwork if they support such campaigns, and thereby create a chilling effect that will dry up contributions.
Matzzie, who has been involved with numerous progressive causes, from Moveon.com to the Campaign for America’s Future, said his group has already sent out a warning letter to 10,000 of the biggest donors to conservative causes and candidates.
“We aim to educate the public about the connections between these donors, many with unsavory business and personal stories, and lawmakers in Washington,” the group’s website declares.
First up on its program is billionaire Texas developer Harold Simmons, who supports John McCain’s candidacy and who has financed ads attacking Barack Obama for his ties to former anti-war activist Bill Ayers, through a new group called the American Issues Project.
Accountable America describes Simmons as having “a long history of corruption and scandal,” citing among other things, a Washington Post story about how he earned his fortune through hostile takeovers, and how his companies have been charged with raiding their workers pension funds to finance such takeover deals.
It also notes that at least one of Simmons’ daughters, Serena Connolly, has donated the maximum allowable amount to both Sens. Hillary Clinton and Obama. Another daughter, Lisa Epstein, has donated to Democrats in the past.
Besides Simmons, Accountable America lists five “persons of interest,” including casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, developer George Argyros, financier Carl Lindner, real-estate mogul Richard Farmer and Florida developer and former ambassador Mel Sembler.
Conservative activists said they expect the group to have no impact.
Chris LaCivita, a Republican strategist who helped organize the Swift Boat effort, told the New York Times that Matzzie’s group was likely to fire up potential donors, rather than discourage them.
“They’re not going to be intimidated by some pipsqueak on the kooky left,” LaCivita said.
With all the talk of political dynasties passing the torch – or being shoved out of the way – little attention has been paid to another Democratic scion who shared the stage with Hillary Clinton last night.
Her name is Cecile Richards. And like her mother, the late Democratic matriarch and Texas Gov. Ann Richards, she is a powerful, in-your-face speaker who drives home political points with wit and, often, raunch.
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“Elections are about choices, and Mom would have said that women voting for John McCain would be like chickens choosing to vote for the Colonel,” Richards wrote in a recent column on Huffington Post.
Now president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Richards spent her time last night excoriating John McCain’s record on women’s health issues.
“John McCain has voted against women’s health care 125 times,” she said. “You can look it up: he voted against real sex education, against affordable family planning and, if elected, John McCain has vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade.”
Richards also recalled her mother’s sharp-tongued appraisal of then vice-president George H.W. Bush at the 1988 Democratic National Convention.
“Poor George,” Ann Richards had said then. “He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”
(Six years later, Ann Richards would be defeated by George W. Bush in her gubernatorial re-election campaign in Texas. She died from esophageal cancer in September, 2006.)
By all accounts, Cecille Richards is a chip off her mother’s block.
A 2004 Texas Monthly profile described her as ” a striking six-footer and longtime labor organizer with a bright, explosive laugh who can stop a room when she walks into it just as her mother can.”
She told the magazine how her involvement in politics was all but inevitable after growing up stuffing political mailings, learning precinct politics, and hosting anti-war rallies.
“Other families did bowling,” she said. “We did politics.”
Besides her mother’s involvements, her father, David Richards, was a labor lawyer involved in civil rights, among other issues.
“We represented every union in the South,” David Richards told Texas Monthly. “Teamsters and garment workers, plumbers and pipe fitters.”
For entertainment, the family would sit around in the evening, singing old union songs like “Joe Hill.”
After graduating from Brown in 1980, Cecile Richards worked as a union organizer, first among garment workers in the Rio Grande Valley, then with hotel workers in New Orleans and janitors in Los Angeles. Her work directing the Justice for Janitors campaign was dramatized by Adrien Brody in the movie Bread and Roses.
In 1982, Richards met her husband, Kirk Adams, also a labor organizer and now chief of staff of the Service Employees International Union, the largest union in America. The couple, who had three children, moved back to Texas in 1990 so they could work on Ann Richard’s campaign.
Her mother’s defeat in 1994 was what led Cecile Richards to refocus her energies on electoral politics.
After the loss, Richards founded a grassroots organization called the Texas Freedom Network. The idea was to oppose the influence of conservative Christians in Texas politics, particularly in the election of school boards.
Despite importunings to go into electoral politics, Cecile Richards followed her husband back to Washington in the late 1990s, and went to work for Ted Turner “to help build the infrastructure of the choice movement in America,” as she described it.
In 2002, she became deputy chief of staff for Democrat Nancy Pelosi, of California, who had just become minority whip in Congress and was about to become minority leader. Eighteen months later, she left that job to become president of a new organization, America Votes, a coalition of several dozen progressive groups intent on turning out the Democratic vote in 2004.
That was the position from which Planned Parenthood recruited her in 2005. Richard had no health background, but brought the steely resolve, as well as the rolodex, of a seasoned political operative.
“Listen, the reason I took this job is, I feel like we need to go into the 21st century,” she told the Washington Post in 2006. “Clearly, with some folks in the country, we’re going to get there kicking and screaming.”
Under Richards’ leadership, the group has been an unabashed presence at the convention. Volunteers have been stationed outside the Pepsi Center, handing out over 700 pounds of pink-papered condoms labeled “Protect Yourself from John McCain.”
