Photograph by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

President Barack Obama participates in a naturalization ceremony in the East Room of the White House on March 25, 2013 in Washington DC.

President Barack Obama will headline two San Francisco Bay-Area fundraisers next week for the Democratic National Committee, which is trying to dig itself out of a $22 million hole.

Obama will make his DNC pitches on April 4; the day before, he’ll participate in two San Francisco fundraisers for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The April 4 festivities begin with a 30-person brunch at the Atherton  home of Liz Simons and Mark Heising, followed by a lunch for 200 at the nearby home of Marcia and John Goldman, according to DNC invitations.

Heising is managing director of Medley Partners, a private equity firm based in San Francisco. He sits on the board of the Environmental Defense Fund. Obama named Goldman, a board member of the San Francisco Symphony and its former president, to the Advisory Committee on the Arts for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Brunch costs $32,400 and includes a photograph with the president, and lunch is $1,000 per plate (more for a photo).

It could be a $1 million day for the DNC, which needs the cash influx. In its March 20 report to the Federal Election Commission, it reported almost $22 million in debts and obligations and about $4 million cash on hand as of the end of February.

The parties are experiencing a bit of reversal of fortune these days.

The Republican National Committee’s money woes while former Maryland Lt. Go.v Michael Steele was its chairman were well-chronicled. Last month, the RNC had zero debt and $7.5 million in the bank.

Original post is DNC in Money Pit, Obama Heading West: Gold on That Bay by Political Capital.

Photograph by Chris Thompson/SpaceX via Bloomberg

Space Exploration Technologies Corp.'s (SpaceX) Falcon 9 rocket takes off in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Elon Musk, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who splits his time between running the electric car-making Tesla Motors Inc. and rocket-making Space Exploration Technologies Corp., sees “good economic times ahead” for the U.S.

His Tesla, which received $465 million in federal loans in 2009 from the Obama administration to develop and build electric Model S sedans, had been cited as a “loser” company by Republican Mitt Romney in an Oct. 3 presidential debate — the same day Musk said the car-maker was making an “advance payment” for the federal loans.

SpaceX has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA for at least a dozen resupply flights to the International Space Station.

Post-election, Musk has shared his views about the economy going forward. He had declined to discuss Romney’s comments, didn’t publicly support either him or President Barack Obama and says he doesn’t expect “any significant impact” on either Tesla or SpaceX with the president’s re-election.

“The economy is improving quickly. This would happen no matter who is president,” Musk said. “I don’t think people appreciate that the president is like the captain of a huge boat with a tiny rudder.”

The slowly improving real estate market bodes well for continued economic recovery, he said.

“Now we’ve used up the housing stock and the housing industry is ramping up to normal employment levels. Housing, fully considered, is the biggest sector of the economy, so this will of course have a big positive effect on the economy,” he said. “Good times ahead!”

Balancing the budget must become Obama’s top priority, he said: “By this, I mean at least get the deficit under half a trillion. This needs to happen mostly through spending reductions, but will require some increase in taxes.”

It’s “obvious to everyone” that drastic cuts in government spending are necessary, he said, suggsting it wouldn’t be so bad if the automatic spending cuts that are part of the year end fiscal cliff took effect — given a choice between that and no cuts, he’d take the sequestration.

“The toughest challenge for the president will be cutting government spending,” Musk said. “Every special interest will lobby extremely hard to keep their funding, so fighting them will take incredible resolve.”

“This is the best thing about second-term presidents — they can afford to upset the system and not worry about re-election. President Obama cares about his legacy. He doesn’t want to leave office with the biggest deficit in history.”

Original post is Legacy-Conscious Obama Sure to Act on Deficit: Silicon Valley’s Musk by Political Capital.

Photograph by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

President Barack Obama during a campaign event at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in California, on June 6, 2012.

President Barack Obama hopes he still can run as an agent of change.

The catchwords of the election campaign which made the junior senator from Illinois the first African-American president in a nation that still was struggling over civil rights as he was growing up have been tested by three of the toughest years in modern times.

“People ask me sometimes, `Well, how does this campaign compare to 2008?” Obama said at a re-election campaign fundraiser yesterday in San Francisco, part of a two-day Western tour.  “ I say, `If somebody asks you, you tell them it’s still about hope and change. And if you want to know what change is, change is the first bill that I signed into law that said — the Lilly Ledbetter law that says an equal day’s work deserves an equal day’s pay, and that our daughters should be treated the same way as our sons.”’

That, notably, was first-day legislation.

What transpired in the three-plus years that  followed Obama’s inauguration has tested the ability of a president to confront the worst recession since the 1930s and his ability to compel a divided Congress to act as needed. Out of the gate, Obama won an economic stimulus which even the Republican governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, has called a “finger in the dike” against a tide that could have brought even more serious job losses. He engineered a bailout for General Motors that is paying dividends in jobs and profits today.

Yet, more fundamentally, voters are likely to ask what really has changed since Obama’s election — what about the nation’s capital, in particular, has changed. There’s no shortage of evidence that the inability of Congress to agree on anything significant since the hard-fought health-care legislation which Obama won — and which now rests at the Supreme Court — or the financial regulations which Republicans vow to repeal is proof positive that little has changed in Washington.

“Change is making sure that not only are we attracting manufacturing back to our shores, but we’re investing in advanced manufacturing — in areas like advanced battery technology, or solar energy, or wind power — that will not only usher in tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of new jobs all across America but are also going to make sure that we are passing on to our kids and our grandkids the kind of planet that they deserve,” Obama said yesterday, within the media market of Silicon Valley.

“Change is us saying we’re going to stop funneling tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to banks for running the student loan program,” the president said. “Let’s just give that money directly to students, so that millions more young people are getting Pell grants and reducing the burden of debt that they have when they go to college, because we want to make sure that America continues to have the best-educated workforce in the world. That’s what change is. That’s what we’ve done.”

“Change is making sure that, yes, we passed a health care bill so that 30 million Americans won’t be worried about going bankrupt in case they get sick,” he said, “and now we’ve got 2.5 million young people who are on their parents’ insurance because of this law and millions of seniors who are seeing lower costs for their prescription drugs because of this law. And everybody is able to get preventive care, and women are no longer being charged more than men for it. And they can’t drop you from coverage just when you need it most. That’s what change is.”

Something else has changed since 2008, Obama suggested in San Francisco: The tenor of the other party.

“When I ran in 2008, ” Obama said, “I was running against a guy who I had a lot of disagreements with, but he believed in climate change, he believed in campaign finance reform, he believed in immigration reform. ”’

That was Senator John McCain of Arizona, who co-sponsored with the late Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts legislation that would offer a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, who co-sponsored with former Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin legislation that capped the “soft money” that big donors could give to the political parties and who was the last major party’s candidate for president to accept public financing for his election campaign, giving way to an era in which unlimited donations by often-secret donors are bankrolling the campaigns of committees whose spending threatens to swamp candidates of either party in November.

“The character of the party and the Republicans in Congress had fundamentally shifted,” Obama said yesterday.

There’s little question that the president’s rival party, offering Republican Mitt Romney as the alternative this year, has changed. Tea Party-backed candidates are responsible for the retirement of longtime lawmakers such as Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, a Republican long viewed as someone with a vision that transcended the party  divide. Lugar and others have been run out by candidates who vow no compromise with their ideals.

The question, for Obama, is whether he can continue to campaign for re-election on the change he promised in 2008, as the most significant change in Washington since then has fostered more political divisiveness than any hope of something new.

Original post is Obama Still Running on Change by Political Capital.

Photograph by Jin Lee/Bloomberg

AOL Inc. company headquarters in New York.

Silicon Valley has Steve Case to thank for a new law that will cut back securities rules for start-up firms and allow companies to use Internet platforms to raise cash.

Case, co-founder and former chief executive officer at America Online Inc., played a central role in a rare show of congressional comity that led to the enactment of the law, which had the support of President Barack Obama and his regular Republican sparring partner Eric Cantor, the House majority leader from Virginia.

Case, who lives in Cantor’s home state, leveraged his relationships with the Republican and with Obama’s team, some of whom he’s known since his time working with the Clinton administration on Internet issues in the 1990s. He refused to appear at press conferences without members of both parties present. When he participated in briefings with Obama about different proposals eventually included in the law, he made sure to give presentations to Cantor the next day.

And when he saw that, despite a gridlocked Congress, the JOBS Act was on the precipice of passage, Case, with a ubiquitous Twitter presence, called in his friends and allies in the technology and social media worlds to give it one final push across the finish line.

Congressional aides, lobbyists and other participants in the year-long process to get the measure enacted attribute their success to a number of things: a White House looking for avenues to create jobs after a mid-term election shellacking, House Republicans looking to prove they can govern in a bipartisan fashion, fundraising from the deep-pocketed tech community, and a group of senators, many fresh off the campaign trail and with experience in private equity or venture capital, looking to foster the growth of innovative new ideas.

None disagree, however, that Case, who is already back on Capitol Hill pushing the “JOBS Act 2.0,” didn’t play a key role.

See the full story at Bloomberg.com.

Original post is Steve Case: You Have Hill Fan-Mail by Political Capital.