WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama on Saturday named longtime spokesman Robert Gibbs as White House press secretary and reached outside his inner circle for the post of White House communications director.
The director of communications will be Ellen Moran, the current executive director of the Washington group EMILY’s List, an active supporter of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Democratic presidential primary. Moran will join a team of longtime close advisers who will work closely with Obama on a daily basis.
Obama’s choice of Moran was a surprise compared to Gibbs, who went to work for Obama’s Senate campaign in 2004 and was communications director while Obama was in the Senate. Moran’s deputy in the White House will be Dan Pfeiffer, currently the communications director for Obama’s presidential transition team.
“These individuals will fill essential roles, and bring a breadth and depth of experience that can help our administration advance prosperity and security for the American people,” Obama said in a statement. “This dedicated and impressive group of public servants includes longtime advisers and a talented new addition to our team, and together we will work to serve our country and meet the challenges of this defining moment in history.”
Moran will head the team in charge of getting Obama’s message out. As the head of EMILY’s, which backs Democratic female candidates who support abortion rights, Moran has said Obama would have to work hard to win over women supporters who felt let down after Clinton’s historic presidential bid fell short. (more…)
Kasım 23rd, 2008
Clinton returns to the Senate as a leader of women and the working class.
What becomes now of Hillary Clinton? Will she run again for President? Make a bid for Senate majority leader? Go home to New York and run for governor? Does she covet a job in Barack Obama’s Cabinet or maybe an appointment to the Supreme Court? No, no, no and no, come the answers. As she told me recently, “I’m going to be focused, as I always have been, on what we’re going to get done. I’m not interested in just enhancing my visibility. I’m interested in standing on the South Lawn of the White House and seeing President Obama signing into law quality, affordable health care for everybody, and voting in a big majority for clean, renewable energy and smarter economic policies. That’s what I’m all about, and I’m going to use every tool at my disposal to bring it about.”
But it’s hard to imagine Hillary Clinton ever playing just a supporting role. She is now both a smaller and a larger figure than when she set out on her first presidential-campaign swing through frigid Iowa nearly two years ago. And that puts her at something of a crossroads. “She’s not who she was before she ran, when everyone deferred to her as a former First Lady and a President-in-waiting,” says a prominent Democratic strategist. While she didn’t achieve the Clinton Restoration, Hillary emerged from that race as the symbol of a movement that has come to represent the hopes and frustrations of millions of working-class Democrats.
Looking back on what she accomplished in the primaries, Clinton said, “I really felt like people were responding to my campaign in large measure because they feel invisible, that they have just been overlooked and marginalized in ways that undermine their hopes for the future and their capacity to realize their own dreams.” And, her advisers note, there is another constituency for whom there is no more obvious leader. Female voters, says a close ally, are an “awakened group of women who have no logical leader. It’s hers for the asking.”
Clinton put that star power to full use this fall, campaigning at more than 200 rallies and fund raisers for upwards of 80 candidates across the country. I caught up with her four days before the election, between stops in Ohio, where she was stumping for Obama in precincts that she won decisively during the Democratic primary. She also continued to work at the unfinished business left over from her presidential bid, starting with a $25.2 million campaign debt. She has whittled it down to about $2.6 million, depending on how you count. That figure does not include the $13 million that she loaned the campaign out of personal funds and will not get back. Nor does it account for the $5.2 million that she owes her former chief strategist Mark Penn–who is a flash point with some of her donors and whose bill, therefore, is not likely to be paid off anytime soon.
(more…)
Kasım 9th, 2008
LOS ANGELES - Lisa Marie Presley is a mom again. A publicist says the 40-year-old singer gave birth Tuesday to twin girls, whose names were not released. One baby weighed 5 pounds, 15 ounces and the other came in at 5 pounds and 2 ounces.
A statement released Saturday says Presley gave birth by Caesarean section. She lives in the Los Angeles area and the publicist says the births took place somewhere on the West Coast but won’t provide details.
The statement says “babies and mom are happy and healthy and resting at home.”
Presley is the daughter of Elvis Presley and is married to music producer Michael Lockwood. She has a 19-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son by a previous marriage.
Ekim 12th, 2008
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - “Samantha Who?” star Christina Applegate avoided hugs for weeks and hid her cancer diagnosis from nearly everyone working on her hit television program, the actress said in an interview airing on Friday.
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Applegate, 36, publicly revealed her diagnosis for breast cancer in August and had a double-mastectomy performed.
The actress told chat show host Ellen DeGeneres that she went back to work on her sitcom “Samantha Who?” for about five weeks right after her surgery, but mostly kept her diagnosis a secret.
“I told my make-up and hair people and people that are really close to me just so I had a protection wall so that no one was pushing me,” Applegate said.
The California-born actress has said she is cancer free since her surgery. She told DeGeneres that, despite the pain her diagnosis caused her, she is now feeling better.
She said she had been reluctant for a time to hug people “but now I’m good. I’ll grab you,” Applegate said.
“I’m going to hug you a bunch during this commercial break,” DeGeneres told Applegate.
Applegate rose to fame playing the ditzy daughter of a shoe salesman on TV sitcom “Married … With Children.”
She won an Emmy, U.S. television’s top honor, for a guest role on “Friends.” On “Samantha Who?” she plays an amnesiac trying to pull her life together.
Applegate was interviewed on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” for a segment airing on Friday. (Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis: Editing by Jill Serjeant)
Ekim 12th, 2008