Building a money machine - Barack Obama’s impressive fundraising for his presidential bid is no fluke: He has cultivated insider donors since early in his political career.
Chicago Tribune (IL) - Friday, April 13, 2007
Author: David Jackson and John McCormick, Tribune staff reporters
EXCERPT
A friend to money managers
Elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, Obama crafted a reputation for serving the disadvantaged — and for drawing sustained support from Chicago's flourishing black-owned financial and investment firms.
Officers and employees of Holland Capital Management donated more than $40,000 to committees that directly supported him from 1999 through last year, for example, and directors and workers at Ariel Capital Management gave more than $50,000 over that period.
Those firms and others met with Illinois officials beginning in 2001, asking to manage a larger portion of the state's multibillion-dollar pension funds. And they found an ally in Obama. Among other initiatives, he served for three months, from September to December 2003, on the seven-member Senate Select Committee on Public Pension Investments, which recommended ways for state pension funds to use more minority- and women-owned financial firms.
During Obama’s three months on the panel, Ariel directors and employees gave him $14,500, records show, and Holland officers and employees donated $1,500.
If some self-interest was perhaps at play, so too was a sense of shared experience that inspired many African-American professionals. Many of them had never before raised money for a candidate but found common ground in Obama’s Ivy League education, in social networks that crisscrossed the city and in an ethos that celebrated the accumulation of wealth — if it was used to address the broad inequities faced by black Americans.
“You had people who had never participated at this level before. Not just their own contributions, but also rallying other people,” said Ariel President Mellody Hobson.
She recalled hosting an early Obama fundraiser at her cramped Near North Side apartment in about 1995. As the one-bedroom overflowed with a “mixed group” of people, she said some of the furniture had to be moved out into the hallway to make room for the crowd.
By 2003 and 2004, she said, the buy-in from African-American professionals was so strong that fundraising became relatively easy. “They felt the time was now to get behind one of our own,” Hobson said.
In a typical pattern, Hobson said she met Obama’s wife through Obama’s brother-in-law Craig Robinson , a Princeton University grad like her, and a 1990s board member of a foundation for inner-city students created by Ariel executives.
Obama’s brother-in-law also served in 1999 as a managing director at the bond underwriting firm Loop Capital Markets, which was co-founded by Obama’s neighbor, friend and political financier James Reynolds Jr. Several of Obama’s most active financiers — black and white — say they were first introduced to him by Reynolds.
Among those is investment adviser Barbara Bowles, who had given close to $9,000 even before Obama started his presidential bid, and former Chicago Stock Exchange Vice Chairman Andrew Davis, who with his wife gave $24,000 to Obama’s U.S. Senate bid. Davis served on Obama’s Illinois finance committee for that campaign.
Reynolds also brought Obama to Les Coney, who recalled hosting a late-1990s Obama reception at the Mid-America Club in Chicago where they greeted about 15 guests and raised roughly $5,000.
"Those firms and others met with Illinois officials beginning in 2001, asking to manage a larger portion of the state's multibillion-dollar pension funds. And they found an ally in Obama. Among other initiatives, he served for three months, from September to December 2003, on the seven-member Senate Select Committee on Public Pension Investments, which recommended ways for state pension funds to use more minority- and women-owned financial firms."
I believe that Blago has done this to stick it to his enemy IL AG Lisa Madigan who is chomping at the bit to become the next governor of Illinois.
Now Burris will be in a good position to run against Madigan in the Democrat Governor primary in 2010.