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Battle heating up to save Purple Heart stamp
Hillary Clinton and veterans join forces as first-class rate goes to 39 cents today.
January 8, 2006
http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/nation/story/14051169p-14882483c.html With first-class stamp prices rising today from 37 to 39 cents, the Postal Service is getting 2 cents' worth from a wounded veterans group and a senator eyeing a presidential run.
The Military Order of the Purple Heart and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., are in a petition and letter-writing campaign to extend the life of the Purple Heart stamp. With a growing constituency behind them as the Iraq war wears on, they might succeed.
"We're taking into consideration people's desire to have this, and we're working on it," Postal Service spokesman Jim Quirk said Friday. "We're just trying to decide how best to go about it."
Each time the price of stamps goes up, the Postal Service sells what remains of the old issue but makes no new ones. Then new images get a turn.
In May 2003, the Postal Service unveiled a 37-cent stamp bearing the image of the Purple Heart.
Less than two years later, with the war raging, the Postal Service announced its plan to raise the first-class rate to 39 cents. Purple Heart recipients knew what that meant - and they began a campaign to stave off their stamp's demise.
In their fight, the service organization for Purple Heart recipients turned again to Clinton, a key supporter in the original stamp campaign. She was a solid choice, if not the most obvious one.
Clinton, meanwhile, has a personal and political connection to the Military Order of the Purple Heart. The group's legislative director, Hershel Gober, a Purple Heart recipient, is an Arkansas native. When Clinton's husband was governor of that state, he tapped Gober as director of the state veterans affairs department. And when Bill Clinton became president, Gober came to Washington as deputy secretary and, during the last year of the administration, secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. In the Purple Heart stamp campaign, Gober said, "I reached out and asked Hillary if she could help us."
