No matter how much President Obama has changed over the years, the one thing he's never lost is his feel for community organizing, though these days he's working a slightly better neighborhood.
Whether you're working Chicago's South Side or Beverly Hills, a good organizer knows that a pat on the back will coax another mile -- or maybe another few thousand -- out of the troops. Even so, local Democratic activists were pretty impressed when the president invited them to Washington on Monday for a dinner at the Mandarin Oriental hotel designed to thank members of the Obama National Finance Committee and other supporters, like the ones who helped make his recent national fundraising tour on behalf of the Democratic National Committee such a success. The star-studded evening last month at the Beverly Hilton was the tour's crown jewel, so it was no surprise that a large contingent of longtime Obama supporters in Hollywood were invited back to Washington to accept the chief executive's personal expression of gratitude.
Among the local contingent who made the trip back to Washington were ambassador-to-be Nicole Avant, Charlie Rivkin, Ken Solomon, veteran Democratic organizer John Emerson, political strategist Kerman Maddox, Michael and Mattie Lawson, Candace McKeever, Cookie Parker, Cate Park and Nancy Stevenson.
They not only got the chance to hear Obama give a personal recap of his first five months in office and plans for the next year, but also had the opportunity to rub elbows and exchange views with key White House staffers such as Valerie Jarrett, Jim Messina, Van Jones and Tina Chen.
The guests also heard from Jane Stetson, the DNC's national finance chair; Penny Pritzker, former Obama for America finance chair; and Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, who chairs the DNC in his spare time. If there appears to be a fundraising theme running through the evening . . . well, that's because there was. The DNC has been running behind the Republicans in recent money-collecting efforts and, with the midterms not all that far away, doesn't want to be caught short. (Neither does the president, who is relearning the value of substantial congressional majorities every week.)
Stonewall remembered
If anybody wanted a snapshot of just how much the U.S. has changed over the past 50 years, all they needed was a picture of the White House's storied East Room, where the nation's first African American president and First Lady Michelle Obama played host to a distinguished group of gay and lesbian Americans, celebrating a movement that began in a gay bar in New York.
