Apr 18, 2008  |  By: CHRIS JOHNSON  | COMMENTS     

A gay West Coast couple is busy bringing in millions of dollars from California residents to help Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama win the White House.

Jeremy Bernard and Rufus Gifford make up B&G Associates, a financial consulting company that assists Democratic candidates with California fundraising activities. The money generated from the entertainment capital of the United States has helped fuel the campaigns of many candidates over the years, leading some, including Bernard, to call California an “ATM” for Democratic candidates.

“It’s an ATM, but it’s not their only ATM, so we try to do the best we can,” Bernard said during a phone interview from the Los Angeles home he shares with Gifford.

According to Federal Election Commission data, the couple has helped steer nearly $27 million in donations from California residents to Obama, helping to propel the candidate from second-place standing in the polls to front-runner status over Hillary Clinton, who only a few months ago enjoyed a double-digit lead.

Julianna Smoot, the Obama campaign’s finance director, says Bernard and Gifford “personify everything you want” in a fundraising team.

“They have a golden Rolodex,” she says. “They are as pleasant to work with as they are aggressive and they have demonstrated a deep commitment to our campaign — they dig into the trenches with the rest of us.”

A number of California’s movers-and-shakers have emptied their pockets at the behest of the Bernard and Gifford. Some A-listers who’ve donated to Obama’s campaign include Michael Lynton, chair and chief executive officer for Sony; Mike Medavoy, the chief executive officer for Phoenix Pictures and former mogul for Orion and TriStar Pictures; and Ron Meyer, president and chief operating officer for Universal Studios. (Medavoy and Meyer have also donated money to Clinton.)

The couple’s influence was noted this month by Out magazine, which ranked the couple at No. 32 on its annual list of the “50 most influential gays.”

Gay media mogul David Geffen has also been one of Obama’s “loyal supporters,” Gifford says.
Geffen, who is reportedly worth $6 billion, is one of the founders of DreamWorks Pictures and creator of Geffen Records. In a February 2007 interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, Geffen notoriously severed his political ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton and lambasted the couple, saying that “everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it's troubling.”

Bernard and Gifford held their first fundraising event for Obama with Geffen and his fellow DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Gifford says all of these high-profile Californians “are actively involved in the campaign and try to help us on a daily basis — they’ve been terrific.”

Despite their success with executives with big pocketbooks, Bernard and Gifford are most proud of the money they raised from California residents whose wallets are more standard size. Volunteers at Obama’s finance office have been bundling checks that sometimes range between $10 and $30. The volunteer bundlers will return to the office in following weeks with another batch of small checks.

“You have people who are constantly coming in with various sizes of donations because they want to be a part of it and want to give whatever they can,” Bernard says.

The couple enjoys the diversity they encounter.

“The coolest part of this campaign is we brought people on board [and] this is the first time they’ve ever experienced this whole thing before,” Gifford says.

Working for what Bernard calls “such an inspirational candidate” makes fundraising “very, very, very easy.”

“We are very blessed to have a candidate who is as talented as he is. He is as good as they get.”

Bernard is particularly impressed with Obama’s viability in states that are traditional Republican strongholds. He pointed to recent polls showing that Obama can compete with GOP presidential hopeful John McCain in traditionally “red” states.

The 43-year-old Bernard has a longer history of working in politics than his 32-year-old partner. He worked for Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992 and was a delegate at the Democratic National Convention in 1996 and 2000. In 1999, then-President Bill Clinton appointed Bernard to serve on a presidential advisory committee at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Given his history, Bernard admits that he would appear to be a “natural” for the Hillary camp. But “a real problem with the war vote” cast by Clinton on the 2002 bill authorizing ...