Whether they raise cash in battleground states or bring a manager's touch to a campaign, these company builders have breached the inner circle of U.S. politics.
George Stephanopoulos and James Carville may have become famous for helping an obscure Arkansas governor win the White House, but it was Eli J. Segal, a Boston-based entrepreneur who owned several puzzle and game companies, to whom Bill Clinton entrusted his campaign's management, in 1992. And, true to form, Segal ran the Clinton machine much like a start-up: solving problems quickly, raising money aggressively, and marketing the hell out of the Man From Hope. After the election, Clinton tapped Segal to launch AmeriCorps, a public-private partnership that organized volunteer initiatives--and that, like many of Clinton's programs, covered a lot of ground on a lean budget.
This year, several campaigns are relying on entrepreneurs to play key roles, from campaign manager to battleground-state fundraiser. What do the entrepreneurs bring to these campaigns, and what do they get out of the brush with big-time politics? Here's a look at eight business owners in the arena.
Gary Levy
In the political realm, New Hampshire is known for two things: its status as the first state in the nation to hold presidential primaries and its voters' aversion to taxes of all kinds, a legacy of the state's "Live free or die" ethos. As a prominent leader of the state's well-established antitax coalition, then, Gary Levy is a player in local politics--and a go-to guy for Republican presidential candidates. His political views stem from the fact that he runs an appliance and electronics retail operation his parents opened, in 1955, after they moved north from Massachusetts in part to get away from--you guessed it--high taxes.
When then-Governor Jeanne Shaheen proposed a statewide sales tax, in 2001, Levy organized business owners to demonstrate at the statehouse, bought print ads, and hired an economist to back up his claims that the sales tax would harm many of the state's small businesses. His efforts paid off: The proposal died, and Shaheen was defeated in her U.S. Senate race the following year. (She is running again in 2008.) Today, Levy, whose business employs 50 people, says the sales-tax fight was an epiphany. "If you work and live in a community, you have an obligation to be involved in the public realm, to be involved and give back, or not complain when bad things happen that affect your business," he says.
As the co-chair of Mitt Romney's state finance committee, Levy has helped the former Massachusetts governor raise $255,200 from Granite State donors as of the third quarter of 2007, the most of any candidate in either party and more than double the runner-up Republican, John McCain. Engaging politically active Republicans in New Hampshire is critical for Romney. Though he trails in the national polls, if Romney can win in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he is ahead, the victories would move him to the front of the pack. And he has enough money to remain in the mix even if he loses the subsequent primaries to Rudy Giuliani, who leads in national polls.
Dave Contarino
Known around Sante Fe as "New Mexico's Karl Rove," Dave Contarino is the entrepreneur with the most powerful role in any of the presidential campaigns. As campaign manager for Governor Bill Richardson, Contarino makes all the big decisions--where to raise money, where to spend it, where to send the candidate, and what the governor will say when he gets there. The two men have become inseparable, and Richardson has called his campaign manager "my most senior and most trusted aide."
Contarino, who founded an Albuquerque title and escrow business with his wife, Linda, in 1994, says he brings the pragmatic, competitive spirit he nurtured in business to the campaign. "When you're a small-business person, you become facile with running budgets and that kind of thing," he says. "We couldn't afford a bookkeeper when we started, but I probably know more about budgets than some political people."
Still, Contarino and his campaign have faced questions about their effectiveness. Though Richardson is a gifted campaigner and a popular governor, he has struggled to gain any kind of electoral toehold and trails the Clinton-Obama-Edwards triumvirate by a wide margin. Some pundits have speculated that Richardson is actually running for vice president, a notion he has strongly rejected. Whether he gets even that far depends on Contarino's ability to get the campaign on track.
Stampp Corbin
In 2005, Stampp Corbin sold RetroBox, a company that helps corporations recycle and dispose of outdated computer equipment. Though he had been politically active enough to serve as an outside adviser to the Small Business Administration under President Bill Clinton, he had no particular interest in turning to politics. But that all changed when the husband of a former schoolmate--he attended the same Chicago high school as Michelle Obama--decided to run for President. "When the opportunity came, given my relationship to the Obamas, I wanted to get involved," says Corbin, who signed on as the senator's liaison to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender, or GLBT, community.
Today Corbin oversees all aspects of the campaign's GLBT efforts, from outreach and messaging to policy positions. That job got unexpectedly complicated last fall when Obama invited Donnie McClurkin, a pastor who had repeatedly made anti-gay remarks, to sing at a campaign concert. In political circles, this was seen as a gaffe, as all the Democratic candidates have been courting the GLBT community.
Rather than try to downplay the controversy, Corbin attempted to put a positive spin on it by suggesting that his candidate was uniquely positioned to bring together gays and African Americans, two of the Democrats' core constituencies that have sometimes been at odds. "A great many African Americans share Pastor McClurkin's beliefs," Corbin said in a joint statement that he issued and that was signed by African American religious leaders and pro-Obama gay rights activists. "It is clear that Barack Obama is the only candidate who has made bringing these two often disparate groups together a goal."
In an interview with The Advocate, a gay newsmagazine, Obama himself reiterated this message: "Part of what I have done in my campaign and in my career is be willing to go to churches and talk to ministers and tell them exactly what I think. And go straight at some of these issues of homophobia that exist in the church in a way that no other candidate has done. I believe that's important." Will voters buy this logic? That remains to be seen.
Gary Hirshberg
Gary Hirshberg's endorsement wasn't supposed to be up for grabs. A self-described social entrepreneur and political junkie, Hirshberg is also a Democratic fundraising giant in the earliest primary state, so his support is coveted. When former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack entered the race for President, in November 2006, Hirshberg agreed to back him. But when the news broke last February that Vilsack was dropping out, Hirshberg received phone calls within a day from every remaining candidate--except Hillary Clinton, whose electability he had already doubted publicly.
