Reply #54: No, David Axelrod is Obama's campaign manager....

[stillcool]

Penny Pritzker is Obama's Finance Manager Do you know who Hillary Clinton's "finance manager" is.?

Penny Pritzker is one of the most active of celebrated Chicago patriarch Abraham N. Pritzker's 12 living grandchildren. A Harvard-trained attorney, Pritzker, 46, was chosen by her late uncle Jay to help oversee the family's vast portfolio of investments, including the Hyatt hotel chain and the Marmon Group industrial conglomerate. The $16.4 billion fortune has since been slated for a carve-up and will eventually include IPOs or outright sales of various Pritzker companies and assets. For now, Penny focuses on real estate investments, developing senior living facilities under the Hyatt Classic Residence name and office properties through a venture with Chicago-based Higgins Development Partners. The 49-story Hyatt Center skyscraper in Chicago's Loop, which she pushed in 2002, opened on July 19, 2005.
—Stephane Fitch

http://www.observer.com/2007/obama-pritzkers-hillary-pritzkers?observer_most_read_tabs_tab=2


The warring (and incredibly wealthy) Pritzker family seems to have carried its feud into presidential politics.
Penny Pritzker, Barack Obama's national finance chair, is the niece of Jay Pritzker, whose death in 1999 sparked an ugly internecine inheritance battle over the Hyatt hotel chain and other enormous family assets.

A plan to pass control of the empire to Penny and two other relatives collapsed in 2001 when another wing of the family filed suit. A settlement was eventually reached, but apparently there are still plenty of grudges, which may explain the division of Pritzker names donating to Hillary Clinton and Obama.

Hillary has the support of the California Pritzkers, a branch that includes Penny's brother, Anthony N. Pritzker -- the director, and co-founder of the Pritzker Group. Jay Pritzker's son John A. Pritzker, who served in various executive positions within the Hyatt Corporation, and his wife Lisa Pritzker, a women's health advocate, are also with Hillary.

Obama has the Chicago Pritzkers behind him. There is Penny, of course, and also her cousin Thomas Pritzker, who, like her, was supposed to inherit the bulk of the family fortune before the lawsuits came. Thomas' wife, Margot, founder and president of WomenOnCall.org, and his mother, Marian, widow of Jay, also contributed to Obama. Karen Pritzker, who is from Chicago but just bought an apartment in Manhattan for $12.5 million, also gave to Obama.

David Axelrod
Party Affiliation: Democratic
Executive summary: Obama's chief political advisor
University: University of Chicago
Professor: Northwestern University

Chicago Tribune (1981-84)
Midwest Values PAC
Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy
Friends of Hillary
Gore 2000
Misericordia
Obama for America
Special Olympics
Jewish Ancestry

Mark Penn


Occupation: Government
Party Affiliation: Democratic
Executive summary: Hillary Clinton campaign strategist
High School: Horace Mann School for Boys, New York City, NY (1972)
University: Harvard University (1976)
Law School: Columbia University

Burson-Marsteller CEO (2005-)
Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates
Microsoft Consultant
The Harvard Crimson
Lithuanian Ancestry Paternal

http://www.americablog.com/2008/02/mark-penns-tangled-c...
Monday, February 25, 2008

Mark Penn's tangled corporate web: Clinton is a client; McCain is a client.
by Joe Sudbay (DC) · 2/25/2008 10:18:00 AM ET ·
http://www.americablog.com/2008/02/mark-penns-tangled-corporate-web.html

As has been widely reported, Hillary Clinton's top guru, Mark Penn, is leading the charge within the Clinton campaign to go aggressively negative against Obama. Besides the fact that Penn is the architect responsible for Hillary's presidential aspirations going from "inevitable" to being on life support, he is reportedly obsessed with destroying Obama. While it is understandable that Clinton's top adviser wants his client to win at all costs, going massively negative against Obama (or Hillary for that matter) risks damaging our candidate in the fall election against McCain. Unfortunately, this is something another "client" would welcome. That client is named John McCain.

Penn is the CEO of Burson-Marsteller, a DC public relations (PR) firm. Burson-Marsteller owns a subsidiary, BKSH. BKSH is run by Charlie Black. Black is a longtime Republican politico, and a top adviser for John McCain for President. And, as Think Progress notes, while Black is a volunteer on the McCain campaign, he views Mcain as his client and continues to take a paycheck from BKSH.

In the years of the Watergage scandal, Rove's career as a big-time political handler began with a motley crew of friends and associates. He was chairman of the College Republicans when George Herbert Walker Bush was chairman of the state Republican Party {sic -- actually the Republican National Committee} in 1973. He won the presidency of the College Republicans in a race against Terry Dolan. The late Lee Atwater, who later became famous as the political attack dog for the Reagan-Bush team, managed Rove's campaign. Dolan went on to become a Soft Money pioneer by helping form the National Conservative Political Action Committee, then died of AIDS in 1986 at age 36. Dolan's advisers in his loss to Rove were Charlie Black, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. Those three were later instrumental in the success of Ronald Reagan's 1984 campaign.

Atwater joined the consulting firm of Black, Manafort and Stone after the '84 election. The firm later worked for the 1988 Bush-Quayle campaign. Two of Nixon's dirty tricksters also worked for Bush-Quayle: Frederick Malek, Bush's Republican National Committee rep, who had compiled lists of Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics as part of Nixon's investigation of a "Jewish Cabal;" and Dwight Chapin, who was jailed for lying to a grand jury about hiring Donald Sigretti to disrupt the 1972 Democratic primary campaign of Senator Edward Muskie. Chapin worked under Manafort in 1988. The firm's other clients included drug-connected Bahamian Prime Minister Oscar Pindling, Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and UNITA, the South African-supported Angolan rebel group led by CIA asset Jonas Savimbi
http://www.famoustexans.com/karlrove.htm

Our Seamless Global Reach

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As a member of the Burson-Marsteller family of companies, BKSH offers an expansive range of services and talent in order to accomplish high-impact public affairs goals for our clients.

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