CAMPAIGN LAWYERS MAY THE BEST CANDIDATE WIN. Claire Cooper

Transcription

1 CAMPAIGN LAWYERS MAY THE BEST CANDIDATE WIN Claire Cooper TONY WEST, Morrison & Foerster, has known of Barack Obama since law school, when Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review and West was incoming president of the Stanford Law Review. Early on, West knew, too, that one day Obama would run for president. BARACK OBAMA Today s the day, and West is a member of the Democratic candidate s national finance committee as well as a finance cochair for California. He also has worked on criminal justice policy and has done public speaking and media commentary for the Obama campaign. He started helping Obama before he officially began his run for the presidency. Obama s personal story and his message of hope and reconciliation resonate with West, whose parents grew up in the segregated South. He says Obama is uniquely the right choice for president at a time when the nation is hungry for fundamental change. PATRICK RYAN, Winston & Strawn, grew up in Arizona and knew John McCain there as a very responsive senator. But for Ryan the clincher came just a couple of years ago. It was a half-hour-long birthday phone call from McCain to Ryan s father to thank him for his serv- 42 FALL 2008

2 ice to the nation in World War II. The son had casually mentioned the birthday to the Republican senator during a San Francisco campaign stop. Ryan wasn t working for McCain then. He is now as cochair of McCain s San Francisco and Northern California/Bay Area lawyers coalitions. He says that even in San Francisco, he s been able to bring other lawyers around to supporting McCain. Also a member of McCain s energy commission, he likes the candidate s realistic view that development of nuclear energy is a way to wean America off foreign oil. For all sorts of reasons and in every capacity imaginable, local lawyers have been turning out in force for the 2008 presidential candidates. They ve volunteered as policy advisors, fundraisers, and sign shakers; as evangelists working the canapé crowd and foot soldiers slogging through snow; as convention delegates and election day troubleshooters. Leaders of the local legal community have been among the most active. San Francisco District Attorney KAMALA HARRIS is an Obama California chair. Understanding the law, understanding the Constitution, those are critical skills for us at this time in history, and Barack gets it, says Harris, who campaigned for Obama in Iowa, organizes for him, and speaks as a surrogate. She also served as a member of the Democratic Party s platform committee on criminal justice. Former state Court of Appeal Justice DAN KOLKEY, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, a Northern California/Bay Area cochair of the McCain lawyers coalition, calls this election a simple choice between a candidate who s a fad and a national hero who is a candidate. McCain, he says, is the best candidate for the country right now on critical issues such as energy and foreign policy. Kolkey considers Obama appealing and eloquent but says the Democrat s position on bringing down energy prices is based on wishful thinking. In the San Francisco legal community, presidential campaigning came early this election around the time of Obama s 2004 convention keynote address. Making bets on somebody who can have a long-term impact on the future is what I do for a living, says JOHN ROOS, CEO at Goodrich & Rosati and an Obama California finance cochair. Roos first saw Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and then at more intimate settings in the Bay Area. He subsequently read Obama s books. Before Obama announced he would run for president, one of Roos s friends from the 2000 Bill Bradley campaign asked Roos to meet with Obama. He really is something special, the friend said. Roos flew to Washington and found him to be the whole package. JIM BROSNAHAN, Morrison & Foerster, and BILL ORRICK, Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass, both say that they recognize in Obama the same qualities that supporters saw in Robert F. Kennedy four decades ago. A capacity to change the country, Orrick calls it. Orrick met Obama for the first time at a 2004 Senate campaign fundraiser for Obama organized by JEFF BLEICH, Munger Tolles & Olson. Even before Obama announced for president, Orrick joined Bleich in founding Lawyers for Obama. Now Orrick is a member of Obama s national finance committee, and he speaks for the candidate at house parties and debates. THE BAR ASSOCIATION OF SAN FRANCISCO SAN FRANCISCO ATTORNEY 43

3 Brosnahan also found much to like in Obama early on: his book Dreams from My Father, and the way he traveled in his Senate campaign to parts of Illinois where he couldn t hope to get many votes but he went there to listen to other people. In 1968, Brosnahan led a committee of San Francisco lawyers supporting Bobby Kennedy as the candidate who could best heal the nation s wounds. He feels the same about Obama, for whom he s campaigning in California. He s considering campaigning in other key Western states. Before the primary, he made phone calls to help turn out the Obama vote in Oakland. Brosnahan is a member of the candidate s state finance committee. MICHAEL MALETIC, Weil Gotshal & Manges, became a McCain fan and donor when his candidate was in the single digits (in the polls) and news articles about the primary didn t even mention him. As he heard McCain respond to questions at fundraising events, Maletic became more and more enthusiastic. Now, he says, getting out the word that there s a McCain campaign in California is a sort of second job. He s the McCain chair in San Mateo County, in charge of things like recruiting volunteers and donations of office space for telephone banks. He s also a cochair of the Northern California/Bay Area McCain lawyers coalition, and he was a McCain convention delegate. Earlier, he spent a week in New Hampshire, waving McCain signs on street corners and chatting up the voters. He wants to do the same thing in California to open up the dialogue, to make it OK to say, I have different ideas. Maletic says he s calling on Republicans to put up signs to let people know there are McCain supporters who are willing to talk about it. HARMEET DHILLON, Dhillon & Smith, a cochair of McCain s San Francisco coalition, and HEATHER FLICK, the Flick Group, a cochair of McCain s Bay Area/Northern California coalition, were busy identifying supporters in the legal community when interviewed in midsummer. Dhillon expected to hold fundraisers, social events and debate-watching parties for her candidate. An ACLU Republican, Dhillon likes McCain s principled independence. She thinks just as my candidate does, that we ought to have trials for those folks that we think are terrorists. Flick hoped to develop a local legal team for possible election day activity and, perhaps, an op-ed writing team. She had connected with McCain through fundraisers. REBECCA PROZAN was heading to her first national convention as an Obama delegate, hoping to take back what needs to be done for a Democratic victory in the fall and hoping to be a voice for gay marriage in platform deliberations. At one time a regular at the state Democratic conventions she got into politics in a serious way as a thirteen-year-old Fritz Mondale supporter Prozan had dropped out of the campaigns until Barack Obama got me reinvolved. Before the primary, the San Francisco deputy district attorney handled Obama outreach to the lesbiangay-bisexual-transgender community, met with the LGBT press, and organized a group of local leaders to meet with Obama s LGBT policy director. 44 FALL 2008

4 Many other Bay Area lawyers were working for the campaigns unofficially but enthusiastically. I m happy to be in the rank and file, says ANDREW BRIDGES, Winston & Strawn. I m not doing it because I want to be an ambassador or judge... I just feel extraordinarily deeply about getting it right in this election. three appointments to the Supreme Court, and this president can set the direction for the country for the next several decades. When interviewed by this magazine, local lawyers for Mc- Cain mainly were waiting for signals from campaign and party leaders. A former Republican and then a supporter of Evan Bayh, Bridges became an evangelist for Obama, who shows the same ability to attract a broad spectrum of citizens and so much more passionately. The turning point was Obama s courageous performance under questioning at a Woodside fundraiser before the primary. Asked by a guest to describe his decisionmaking process, Obama said prayer played a part. He spoke of the religious roots of abolition and other equal justice causes. Soon after, Bridges and his wife, an Episcopal minister, maxed out on their campaign contributions to Obama and started contributing in other ways. By midsummer Bridges had made six hundred to seven hundred phone calls for Obama. He shook an Obama sign on Woodside Road. For the primary election, he phoned shut-ins to arrange transportation to the polls. He bought thirty copies of Obama s Dreams from My Father to lend or give away. JOHN JOE COTCHETT, Cotchett Pitre & McCarthy, originally a supporter of fellow trial lawyer John Edwards, has been speaking up for Obama among lawyers across the nation, telling them this is a critical election for lawyers... because the next president is going to have two or FORREST A. HAINLINE III, Goodwin Procter, a trial lawyer who thinks of himself as a storyteller, was hoping to help McCain articulate his ideas to the voters. Hainline calls security the top issue, saying McCain understands there are people out there who would very much like to destroy our country, and will if we are not strong enough to stop them. And I don t think Mr. Obama has any idea of that at all. WILL TRACHMAN, O Melveny & Myers, is expecting to go door to door for the Republican candidate, who puts us in the right direction on the environment and shows independence on other issues. During the summer Trachman engaged in casual campaigning for McCain in chat rooms and within his circle of friends and colleagues. PAMELA EPSTEIN, a master of laws student at Golden Gate University School of Law, was hoping to work on policy for McCain. She was using her own network to talk at the grassroots level about international and environmental law issues. She was hoping for a leadership role in town meetings. The native Arizonan said she feels almost a personal connection to her home state s senator. M CCAIN THE BAR ASSOCIATION OF SAN FRANCISCO SAN FRANCISCO ATTORNEY 45

5 Neither Republicans nor Democrats had election day operations in place when we talked to them. But they expected local lawyers to be involved November 4 as they have been in past elections. The work, in fact, begins much earlier than election day. The Republicans typically identify lawyers in each of the state s main regions to train the regular campaign volunteers on what they can and cannot do. The lawyers also work with county registrars to fix problems that arise before the election errors on ballots, for example and they identify county counsel, assistant U.S. attorneys, and others to contact if there s a problem on election day. We like to get lawyers who know the courts in their county and know the judges well enough so that they won t be completely at sea if something should occur, says CHARLES BELL, Bell McAndrews & Hiltachk, the Republicans state general counsel. LANCE OLSON, Olson Hagel & Fishburn, Bell s Democratic counterpart, expected to reactivate the troubleshooting team that handled previous election days for the party. The Democrats state operation has relied on a network of lawyers including FRED ALTSHULER, Altshuler & Berzon, in San Francisco and ROBIN JOHANSEN, Remcho Johansen & Purcell, in the East Bay. They and others in their Sacramento-based firms sit by their phones and computers from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on election day. Each office takes perhaps a dozen or two dozen calls from field workers and then contacts county registrars to report problems typically, a polling place that hasn t opened on time or an insufficient supply of ballots. Altshuler once tried to get a court order extending voting hours at a San Francisco polling place where ballots had arrived late. The case went to Superior Court for an evening hearing. But the election was a landslide, and the case was dropped without a judicial decision. Olson, meanwhile, is in charge of reviewing the statewide picture through a sort of chat room on which the lawyers post incident reports. The problems tend to be inadequate preparation for a heavy turnout or inadequate preparation of poll workers, not manipulation of the system, Olson says. We don t have serious voter fraud and manipulation, he says. California election officials do a good job. Bell agrees. About sixty election suits were filed around the country in 2004, none of them in California, he says. In this state, at least, the lawyers want to win at the polls, not in the courts. Claire Cooper, former Sacramento Bee legal affairs writer, is a Bay Area freelance writer. She can be reached at cooperclaire@sbcglobal.net. 46 FALL 2008