The timing of President Obama’s fundraising swing through California Thursday and Friday couldn’t be more awkward.
Washington is awash with talk of the Democratic rebellion over President Obama’s trade agenda, but that isn’t stopping the president from donning his fundraiser-in-chief hat and spending two days on the West Coast asking deep-pocketed donors to cut checks that will inevitably boost some of same Democrats who opposed him, and help Hillary Clinton’s efforts to win the White House.
Clinton herself will be in California at the same time, on her own separate dash for cash, but the two aren’t scheduled to meet up.
Obama will headline two separate events benefitting the DNC — one at the Los Angeles home of television producer Chuck Lorre, and another over dinner at the Beverly Hills home of filmmaker and playwright Tyler Perry.
When the president heads up north on Friday, he will literally be leveraging his personal ties and former campaign aides’ new perches for a DNC roundtable benefitting Clinton and other Democratic candidates. The event at the home of Uber investor Shervin Pishevar will assemble roughly 20 tech leaders for a private talk with the president.
David Plouffe, Obama’s longtime political adviser who helped on the 2012 re-election, now works for Uber. His former campaign manager, Jim Messina, forged ties with Pishevar years ago while working Priorities USA Action, Obama’s super PAC that is now raising money for Clinton.
The ill-fated fundraising timing was undoubtedly planned long before Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., decided last Friday to block a trade package Obama has said for months is critical to his legacy, and took more than 100 House Democrats with her.
Clinton has also spent the last few days distancing herself from President Obama’s trade agenda and endorsing Pelosi’s decision, suggesting the president should “listen and work with” Democrats to improve the deal to provide more assistance for U.S. workers.
But experts say the presidential fundraising shows usually go on despite intra-party differences — that it’s just part of modern-day politics and party-building.
“I would say that presidents tend to support their parties via fundraising even when some members vote against” their agenda items, said Brendan Doherty, a political science professor at the Naval Academy and the author of “The Rise of the President’s Permanent Campaign.”
Doherty said that toward the end of his presidency, Bill Clinton fundraised for Democratic candidates and members of Congress who hadn’t backed him during the impeachment fight.
Back then, Clinton fundraised more on behalf of individual candidates, while Obama tends to collect cash on behalf of party committees, possibly taking away some of the individual bitterness toward individual members who have bucked him at times during his tenure.
“Presidential fundraising has always been a staple of every campaign,” even when presidents’ polls numbers are running low or the relationship with the candidate running to succeed them is tense or frayed, said Richard Benedetto, a former White House correspondent for USA Today who covered four presidents and now teaches journalism at American University.
“George W. Bush did some fundraising in the last months of his presidency on behalf of [Sen.] John McCain, even though their relationship wasn’t going very well,” he said. “It produces some of these media stories about the awkwardness but it goes on just the same.”
In fact, according to Doherty’s records, President Obama’s fundraising in his second term is tracking quite closely with George W. Bush’s.
Obama has attended 12 fundraisers so far this year, counting the events planned for this week, while Bush had headlined 13 as of about the same stage of his presidency.
Bill Clinton, renowned for his fundraising prowess, had held far more — 34 events at the same point in his final years in office — some of them for Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign.
Still, this fundraising trip is particularly ill-timed with Obama set to rub shoulders with Pelosi near San Francisco at a top-dollar gathering benefitting House Democrats at billionaire climate-change activist’s Tom Steyer’s home.
The event is smack dab in Pelosi’s fertile Northern California fundraising territory, and she is scheduled to be on hand for at least one of the big-donor events.
But, as of Wednesday, the White House wouldn’t say whether the two are even on speaking terms.
Asked just how awkward it will be for him to fundraise with Pelosi in San Francisco after the Democrat deserted him not even a week prior, White House press secretary Josh Earnest tried to brush off the obvious tensions between the two top Democrats.
“The relationship between the president and Leader Pelosi applies to the president and his relationship with the House and Senate Democratic caucuses, which is that the strength of their professional and personal relationship is more than strong enough to weather a difference of opinion over one issue, even an issue as important as this one,” Earnest said Wednesday.
