The administration denies her role as social secretary is tied to her fundraising Rolodex. | AP PhotoTo the big donors who financed President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, the decision to make his chief fundraiser the gatekeeper for White House social events is a promise of access to come.
To good government groups, it’s a cue to start checking on who’s sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom.
The White House staunchly denies Julianna Smoot’s new role as social secretary will bear any connection to her Rolodex. “I’ve got bad news for donors who think that this changes how people get into the White House or who gets into the White House,” press secretary Robert Gibbs told POLITICO, noting that Obama is the first president to release lists of White House visitors. “Being a donor does not guarantee you access to this place, nor does it preclude you from having access to events.”
Smoot, Gibbs said, sees her role as continuing to make the White House the “people’s house.”
But Obama’s decision to make a hire that cuts so sharply across his message of change and of, specifically, ending the old Washington exchange of money and access, has puzzled some allies.
“Maybe they’re thinking of this as jobs creation in the [Republican National Committee] research shop,” gibed one prominent Democrat.
And allies and defenders alike see Smoot as a return to a kind of business as usual.
“The appointment reminds us all that this is a position basically created to make sure that big-money people have access to decision makers,” said Josh Israel, a staffer at the Center for Public Integrity, which first raised questions about the Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers. “She’ll probably be good at it.”
The social secretary job combines a variety of roles — party planner, political operative and, in an earlier era, lady-in-waiting to the first lady. In replacing Desiree Rogers with Smoot, Obama traded a close personal friend with an impressive business résumé for a low-profile staffer with long experience at the core function of fundraising: doling out access to political figures in exchange for money.
Those skills had nothing to do with it, according to Gibbs. “What Julianna brings is a familiarity and knowledge of the Obamas and somebody who is exceptionally detail-oriented and possesses great organizational skills and has the tools that you need to conceptualize, manage and execute the hundreds of events that take place each year,” he said Tuesday.
Where Rogers was criticized for focusing on her own public profile and dropping the ball when uninvited guests slipped into a state dinner, Smoot, who comes to the job after a year as chief of staff to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, will also restore the job’s lower profile
She’s a staffer, not a principal — and will bring her office into closer coordination with her old campaign allies, Gibbs and David Axelrod, rather than with the Obamas and their overlapping, but not identical, Chicago circle.
But Smoot’s long career in Democratic politics — as the fundraiser for John Edwards in his 1998 Senate race, the American Trial Lawyers Association and then-Democratic Senate Campaign Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer, before joining Obama — has led many Democrats to assume that her role is, in fact, to stroke the egos of wealthy Democratic donors who have complained that they lack the access they enjoyed in the Clinton years.
A North Carolina native, Smoot was the Obama campaign’s best-kept secret. While the campaign relished its image as fueled by record sums from small donors, it was also fueled by record sums from large donors. And while an online fundraising team specialized in tapping two-digit sums from the masses, Smoot focused on what she’d always done: garnering maximum contributions from the very rich, gathered at first at small gatherings at donors’ homes and, later, at gala dinners.
“It’s not a hard sell,” she told The Washington Post in a 2007 profile headlined “The $75 Million Woman.”
A former Obama staffer familiar with Smoot’s role said she was being brought in, indeed, in part to add political judgment to the White House social calendar.
“The White House hasn’t had an institutional memory about who helped them in the campaign. Julianna will bring that perspective,” said the aide.
To those who decry the influence of money in politics, that perspective is exactly what Obama should be avoiding. And Rogers, despite what her internal critics see as managerial shortcomings, is credited with changing the guest list, rankling donors but inviting Washington schoolchildren and wounded veterans for tours.
Smoot, by contrast, is presumed by both friends and critics to be likely to restore the place of Democratic donors at the White House table, if not — as in a widely criticized Clinton fundraising practice — in the Lincoln BedroomHaving a person like that in the position is an awful temptation to dole out White House perks, visits and access to donors,” said Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that dogged Clinton’s fundraising practices. “Her Rolodex is donors — she has been swimming among the donors, appropriately so, and it would be naive to think that she’s going to do a 180 and just invite the best and the brightest of American society into the White House as social secretary.”
Transparency and campaign finance groups across the spectrum expressed similar worries.
“Administrations have often offered VIP visits to the White House as a reward for donors, so maybe we shouldn’t be shocked that a fundraiser was appointed the social secretary,” said Bill Allison, an official at the Sunlight Foundation, a transparency group. “We’ll be keeping a closer eye on the White House visitor logs to see who’s invited.”
“There’s going to be a lot of scrutiny as to whether the fundraisers with whom she’s had a close connection over the last several years get their payoff,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director of The Campaign Legal Center, which backs stricter contribution and disclosure limits.
Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for California Rep. Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said the appointment “raises questions” of “whether campaign donors will receive special access.”
“We like to think that the White House would be aware of the appearance of any impropriety and work even more diligently to avoid that from ever materializing,” Bardella said.
In the end, though, campaign finance monitors said Smoot is the most prominent political fundraiser to take the social secretary’s job but hardly the first person to unite political money and White House access.
One of President George W. Bush’s social secretaries had been a campaign finance staffer, though not one as prominent as Smoot, and the job has always involved a degree of what is called in the industry “donor maintenance.”
“It is not surprising to me that you might want someone in that job who would be able to help keep the relationships with your top donors smooth — because apparently they haven’t gone that well,” said Melanie Sloan, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group backed largely by Democratic donors.
Sloan said she didn’t see the appointment as any more troubling than any other element of business as usual in Washington.
“Big donors still expect to be invited to stuff, and there’s nothing more wrong with Julianna Smoot getting that job than anyone else.”
