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Tag: Politics
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Sen. Joe Biden’s younger son gets scrutiny for lobbying, financial dealings
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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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.”
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Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is McCain’s surprise VP pick
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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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 PalinExpectations 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:
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‘Accountable America’ goes for the jugular against big GOP donors
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.
Three of the Four Candidates on the Presidential Slates Have Children in the Military
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Cecile Richards gives John McCain a send-up to make her mother proud
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.
Hint: Click in map to explore connectionsStory continues below interactive map
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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.”
Swift Boat financier Harold Simmons funds anti-Obama TV ad
Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons gave nearly $3 million to the American Issues Project so it can run a TV ad linking Barack Obama to 1960s anti-war radical William Ayers and the Weather Underground.
The national Fox News Network declined to run the ad, the Los Angeles Times reports, but some Fox affiliates in the battleground states of Ohio and Michigan are running it.
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The Web site for the American Issues Project lists Ed Martin and Ed Failor Jr. as its board members.
Martin, a St. Louis attorney, is a former chief of staff for Missouri Governor Matt Blunt, former special assistant to Pope John Paul II, former director of human rights for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, and former chairman of the St. Louis City Board of Elections.
He left the governor’s staff amid a controversy over destroyed emails.
This year Martin led a grass roots effort to oppose the takeover of St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch by Belgium’s InBev.
Failor, also an attorney, is vice chairman of the National Taxpayers’ Union and executive vice president of Iowans for Tax Relief.
Joe Biden is Obama’s pick for vice president
Barack Obama obviously didn’t choose Joe Biden as his running mate to gain electoral votes. Delaware has just three.
And he didn’t tap Biden for geographical balance. Two northerners now head the Democratic ticket.
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Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is in prime position to criticize McCain’s stands on foreign policy, homeland security and defense. Already, he is being called Obama’s “attack dog.”
Joe BidenThe Obama camp announced Biden’s selection by text message at 3 a.m. The two men are scheduled to appear together at a rally in Springfield, IL, at 3 p.m.
Biden has run twice for the White House, in 1988 and 2008. During his most recent campaign, which ended after a poor showing in Iowa, Biden critized Obama as being inexperienced and “not yet ready” for the White House.
The McCain camp seized on this today.
“There has been no harsher critic of Barack Obama’s lack of experience than Joe Biden,” McCain spokesman Ben Porritt told The New York Times. “Biden has denounced Barack Obama’s poor foreign policy judgment and has strongly argued in his own words what Americans are quickly realizing — that Barack Obama is not ready to be president.”
At age 65, 18 years older than Obama, Biden has extensive experience on Capitol Hill, having served six terms in the Senate.
He has also endured many personal tragedies. Soon after his election to the Senate, his wife and daughter were killed in a car crash. Five years later, he remarried. He also has survived two brain aneurysms.
His son Beau, Delaware attorney general and a captain in the Army National Guard, is scheduled to be deployed to Iraq in October.
In the midst of recent spats between the campaigns about who’s wealthier and more elite, Biden is one of the few non-millionaires in the Senate. Having been elected at age 29, he has spent most of his adult life in public office.
Last year he reported his assets were between $62,000 and $405,000, and his liabilities were between $140,000 and $365,000.
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Oprah Winfrey + Barack Obama = 1 million votes (Muckety)
What’s the value of a celebrity endorsement in a political campaign?
In the case of Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, about a million votes.
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Oprah Winfrey“We think people take political information from all sorts of sources in their daily life,” Moore told The New York Times. “And for some people Oprah is clearly one of them.”
Economists Craig Garthwaite and Timothy Moore tracked celebrity endorsements back to the 1920 presidential campaign and concluded that Winfrey was “a celebrity of nearly unparalleled influence.”
Although she has not confirmed any plans to attend the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Winfrey has reportedly rented a Colorado home for $50,000 per week.
Other celebrities expected to participate in the convention include Gwyneth Paltrow, Madonna, Spike Lee, Warren Beatty, Susan Sarandon, Forrest Whitaker, Scarlett Johansson and Kanye West.
Stevie Wonder, Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow and the Black Eyed Peas are scheduled to perform at convention- related events.
Obama already owes much to the stars – and not only to Oprah. Gwyneth Paltrow produced a video backing the campaign and Hollywood fundraisers have contributed more than $4 million to his campaign.
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Elizabeth Edwards, a public figure in her own right, steps out of the spotlight
One of the likely outcomes of John Edwards’ bad judgment is the muting – at least temporarily – of his wife’s public voice.
Over the past year, Elizabeth Edwards, battling an inoperable cancer diagnosed in 2007, has become an outspoken advocate for universal health insurance and a critic of John McCain’s health care proposals.
She is also a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where she blogs occasionally for the center’s Wonk Room.
Elizabeth EdwardsEdwards campaigned extensively for her husband in both 2008 and 2004. Like her husband, she is an attorney, with a degree from the University of North Carolina Law School. She is also a trustee of the Wade Edwards Foundation, named for their son, who died in 1996, at age 16.
Her memoir, Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers, was a best seller.
Last night she released a statement about her husband’s admission to having an affair in 2006:
John made a terrible mistake in 2006. The fact that it is a mistake that many others have made before him did not make it any easier for me to hear when he told me what he had done. But he did tell me. And we began a long and painful process in 2006, a process oddly made somewhat easier with my diagnosis in March of 2007.
This was our private matter, and I frankly wanted it to be private because as painful as it was I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage as well.
She asked for privacy, and an end to the “voyeurism” that has included “news helicopters over our house and reporters in our driveway.”
Both Elizabeth and John Edwards have said their marriage will endure. Yet John Edwards appeared alone last night in his interview with “Nightline.”
Edwards said he’d asked his wife not to accompany him, because “she should not be involved in protecting me from whatever the consequences of this are.”
As the Atlantic reports today, several aides had expected Elizabeth Edwards would speak at the Democratic convention on Monday. But party officials said no invitation had been extended to either John or Elizabeth Edwards.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama told reporters in Hawaii that the couple had decided not to participate in the convention. “If I’m not mistaken I think that…the Edwards family indicated that they probably wouldn’t be attending the convention,” Obama said.