Patrick Gaspard

From Philosopedia

Patrick Gaspard (1968 - )

Gaspard was born in the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo to Haitian parents. President Barack Obama appointed him as the White House director of the office of political affairs, a high position formerly held by Karl Rove and prior to that by Rahm Emanuel under President Clinton.

Gaspard's father had moved with his wife from their native Haiti to post-liberation Zaire, when its Premier Patrice Lumumba appealed to French-speaking academics of African descent to teach there. Three years after their son's birth, the family moved to the Upper West Side, where they lived until Mr. Gaspard turned 11. He was raised in St. Albans, Queens, an area near JFK Airport in New York City.

Gaspard graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School, then attended the School of Visual Arts and Columbia University.

In a front-page New York Observer 29 June 2009 article by journalist Jason Horowitz, Gaspard is described as having an interest in left-of-center intellectuals.

He writes poetry and considers as a personal hero Aimé Césaire, the pioneering Martinique-born black-pride poet and politician who taught the anti-colonialist theorist Frantz Fanon. He also likes Anna Akhmatova, a Russian poet of the Acmeist school.

He has acted in plays and performed spoken word, holds strongly positive opinions about Otis Redding and collects Marvel comics. (His prize possession is the first issue of Conan the Barbarian.) He is a big New York Mets baseball fan.

He was married on the grass of Prospect Park; his wife and two children are about to join him in Washington after living for years in Park Slope. [His brother Michael currently works as a consultant for the New York State Board of Elections Advance Group.]

He jogs regularly and lives cleanly.

“Let me put it to you this way,” former city councilwoman Margarita Lopez, an old boss of Mr. Gaspard, recalled telling Obama vetters who asked her if he ever used drugs or alcohol. “That man doesn’t drink Coca Cola.”

He can be brutal, though.

“Don’t be mistaken about him being a gentleman - don’t even go there,” said Ms. Lopez. “When a situation got to a point that there was no resolution I would reach Patrick and say, ‘Go for it, and bring me no hostages, this battle is going to be won with no hostages.’ And I can tell you Patrick delivered every single time.”

According to Representative Gregory Meeks, Gaspard is "a low key, behind-the-scenes, no-fingerprints kind of guy. I need something, I call Patrick. And if he calls, it's a big deal. He's close to the president.

He got his first taste of campaign work doing advance for the 1988 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson, during which time his energy and affinity with local political organizations caught the notice of Harlem-based consultant Bill Lynch, whose office floor Mr. Gaspard got in the habit of crashing on. Mr. Lynch later brought Mr. Gaspard on to Mr. Dinkins’ first mayoral race, and then to City Hall. “He was smart and loyal and really knew his way around,” Mr. Dinkins recalled.

In 1997, Gaspard worked on outgoing Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger's unsuccessful mayoral campaign against Rudy Giuliani. He became chief of staff to Ms. Lopez, a radical feminist from the Lower East Side and one of Giuliani's most raucous critics. According to Horowitz,

She once declared on the floor of the City Council that Mr. Gaspard was “an honorary lesbian,” and recalled that, at times, he outdid her.

“One time we have a staff member who saw this man, and when she saw this man, she said, ‘Oh my god that man is so handsome, it’s so sad that he’s gay,’” Ms. Lopez said. “Patrick looked at her and said, ‘What did you say?’ And she said, ‘He’s gay, that is so sad. Because he is so gorgeous.’ And Patrick said to her, ‘You mean to tell me that because he is so gorgeous, he should not be gay?’ And she said, ‘Yes, it’s not useful to women!’ And he said, ‘You are the biggest homophobe I have ever met in my life, and you don’t even know it.’”

In 1999, Ms. Lopez loaned Mr. Gaspard out to help 1199 SEIU, the politically powerful service employees labor union, to organize a march in protest of the police shooting death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinean immigrant. Mr. Gaspard impressed them.

“He knows what buttons to push and in what order,” said Jennifer Cunningham, who was then the union’s political director, and who went on to work closely with Mr. Gaspard for the next eight years.

George Gresham, the current president of 1199, said that Mr. Gaspard often took a “statistical” interest in candidates, just as he did to baseball box scores and farm systems, wanting to know not just their vision or why they should hold office, but how they expected to win.

“Patrick could distinguish between those who were serious and those who weren’t,” he said.

Several of his former colleagues said the most difficult time for Mr. Gaspard during that period was in 2002, when the union supported Republican Governor George Pataki over Carl McCall, then a two-term state comptroller who was attempting to become the first black governor in the history of the state.

“All of us developed a political maturity at that time,” said Mr. Gresham. “We say we don’t have permanent friends, we have permanent interests.”

In 2003, Mr. Gaspard went national to work as the deputy national field director for the presidential campaign of Howard Dean, and after Mr. Dean was knocked out of the race, as the national field director for George Soros’ political action group America Coming Together.

In 2005, he took a leave from the union to work for another underdog Democrat, Freddy Ferrer, in a landslide loss to Michael Bloomberg. A year later, when 1199 played a major role in backing Andrew Cuomo, who had challenged Mr. McCall in the 2002 Democratic primary, in his run for Attorney general, Mr. Gaspard worked on races in Massachusetts, Maryland and Washington, DC. He also worked on local races.

“Without Patrick Gaspard, Yvette Clarke would not be in Congress,” said Josh Isay, a consultant to Mr. Bloomberg who worked with Mr. Gaspard on that heated race, a four-way primary in 2006 for a House seat in Brooklyn vacated by Major Owens. In that race, as in most other matters, he did his work quietly.

In December 2006, Mr. Sharpton asked Patrick Gaspard to help him assemble an emergency meeting of about 300 activists, black nationalists, union and political leaders to decide on an appropriate response to the police shooting death of Sean Bell, an unarmed young black man.

In June of 2008, he became the political director for the Obama presidential. campaign On 22 June 2009, Gaspard led an administration call with homosexual activists frustrated with President Obama’s incremental approach to gay rights.

He has no strong Clinton ties thus far on Obama's staff. He told Obama after the first presidential debate, "[You're] more clutch than Michael Jordan."

Critics who do not like Gaspard point out that under his watch, ACT employed convicted felons as canvassers. The independent, not-for-profit organization whose aim is to help people achieve education and workplace success was later found to have violated some campaign finance laws and fined $775,000.