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Rosina Rubin

Rosina Rubin is the chief financial officer of Attitude New York, a limousine service in New York City. Rubin raised more than $1 million for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign in a volunteer capacity, and she’s now a volunteer fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Josh Israel interviewed Rubin on May 25, 2007.

Would you start off by giving us a sense of what led you to become a political donor? Who was the first candidate you donated to, if you remember, and what was the reason you decided to get involved?

I think John Kerry was the first candidate. And the reason was because I had known him a long time ago, after I had graduated from college in Boston, and he was the assistant district attorney in Middlesex County. I knew who he was and I thought very highly of him. And through a series of coincidences, when I was asked to get involved his campaign, I felt that he was somebody I could support.

And that was the presidential race in 2004?

Right.

So you haven’t been at this for too long?

No.

And in that race, you not only contributed yourself, but also raised money from friends, colleagues — enemies maybe?

I have raised money from a lot of people, yes.

And how do you do that? Just call up your friends? Did you hold an event?

It really was a combination of a lot of things. When I first was asked to do it, I remember going to a finance committee meeting, and we were told that we should all try and raise $100,000 over the course of the year.

Did that shock you at the time? 

I remember leaving the meeting and my husband looking at me and saying, “I don’t think we can do this,” and thinking to myself, “Well, I would like to try.” And so I said to him, “Well, I think I’ll try and raise $10,000 for this kickoff event.” Thinking to myself, in the back of my mind, “Maybe over the course of a year I could raise $50,000.” And I kind of got caught up in it.

And did you have a sense of how much you were ultimately able to [raise]?

It was somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.2 or $1.3 million.

Wow. So they asked for a whole lot less than they were getting?

Yes.

I would imagine that would be something that your average campaign would probably be pleased, too.

Yes.

That probably does not happen that often.

I find I have a lot of new friends after that.

I understand that you have not yet been appointed to any ambassadorships. Obviously Kerry wasn’t successful. But did you get anything in exchange?

I have no interest in being appointed to an ambassadorship, or taking a job in the White House, or any of those kinds of things that people sometimes want when they get involved in this sort of thing. I come from a background of a very politically involved family. And I just liked the idea of trying to change the direction that the country was moving in. And that’s why I got involved.

Did you find that other candidates, after seeing your contributions to the Kerry campaign, were eager to reach out to you and ask you to get involved in their races, too?

Yes.

Did they call you on the phone?

Like I said, I have a lot of new friends.

And have you been involved in the 2008 race at this point?

I am involved. I am supporting Hillary Clinton.

And are you working to raise money for her also?

I am.

Sort of the same kind of thing where you are starting small and working your way up?

Actually, I live in Rockland County, which is outside of New York City to the northwest of the city. I have often referred to Rockland as “pink New York,” because there is about 2-to-1 Democrat registration here. But the Democratic turnout, for at least as long as I have lived here, which is seven years, is not that great. And a lot of the time, Republicans win both on the national and local level. So in my involvement here, I have made a point of trying to bring nationally and statewide known Democrats into the county, either in support of local candidates or to do that for themselves. And a couple of weeks ago we had a reception in our house with President [Bill] Clinton in support of Hillary Clinton. It was the single largest fundraiser ever held for a political candidate in this county. So I am pretty proud of that.

What was that like? Other than, I imagine, probably a whole lot of people in your house.

It was really a tremendous experience. Because nothing like that has ever happened around here. The last time President Clinton had been in the county, I think, was about eight or 10 years ago. And that was for a governors conference. So he had never been here for a fundraiser in a private home. I think it was very motivating for Democrats. I think it was a great opportunity for people who already were supporting Hillary to come out and support her. It was a good opportunity for people who weren’t sure to come out and hear from the president as to why they should support her. 
I think it will have a ripple effect as we go into the local elections in November. Because we have already, just a couple of days ago, had a group of women who got together in Orange County at the home of Harriet Cornell, who is the chair of the Rockland County legislature here, about 50 women to talk about supporting Hillary and to talk about local issues and politics. So that’s just very good.

What, approximately, would you say was the turnout for the event?

It was over 100 people.

Wow. Is that high for the number of people you usually have in your house at one time?

We have had a couple of big parties here. And we have had some large fundraisers here that have approached that number. But it was a good number of people.

For someone who may not be familiar with having ever been to an event with the president, or former president, of this caliber, I assume [it is] sort of a fairly crowded thing where people may talk to him for a couple of minutes, get a picture with him.

Well, the thing that I found about being in a room with him — the first time I met him, there were probably about 200 or 300 people in the room — it feels like you are the only one when he is talking to you. He is not like a lot of politicians who stand in a room and talk to you and their eyes are darting all around, looking for who the next person they should go talk to. He gives you a lot of personal attention and makes you feel like you are just there with him.

The format was such that he did get to mingle with a lot of people. And he took a lot of pictures. And I think everybody in the house, except me, had him sign something. And he got up and made some remarks. Then he took some questions on health care, and global warming, and the Middle East. And there was a real dialogue. I had some people here who were Republicans, who had differing opinions from him. And he listened. And there were some people who raised some local issues that had been affected by legislation that had been signed during his term. And he was very interested to hear what they had to say. So it was, all around, a very good evening. And I believe he had a good time as well.

I would imagine it was probably quite an experience. And I would imagine the neighbors were probably . . .

I think I had the entire town police department at the foot of my driveway. The Secret Service had been here and said that they wanted to keep it low-key. But the entire police department had seemed to have shown up anyway. And one of my guests said that she thought if you were going to commit a crime in this town, that would have been the night.

Hopefully no one did.

The house made the local news. The reporter couldn’t get anywhere near the house because of the police at the end of the driveway. So he stood in the middle of the street. And you saw the house in the backdrop. And local news here plays on an hourly news loop. So once an hour for that evening and into the next morning, there was the house on the news.

Do you do any of your fundraising on the Internet?

Not a tremendous amount. Toward the end of the 2006 cycle I set up an ActBlue page because there were a number of candidates that I really felt needed a push at the end. So it seemed like a productive way to send out an e-mail to everybody that I knew, which has become a fairly big list.

And probably getting bigger by the day?

Getting bigger by the day. [I wrote] to say if you have a little bit left and you want to support a good candidate who could really use your help, go to my ActBlue page and pick somebody. And a lot of people did.

And ActBlue is a webpage that you create to allow people to contribute directly to campaigns?

Yeah. It’s basically a website that’s set up that mainly focuses on national candidates, although I think that state candidates, to some extent, can link through it. And what you do is you set up a page and it has your own designated address in it. And you can set up links to any of the candidates that you are able to link through to ActBlue. And they pop up on your page.

And then people visiting the page can select from that the candidates and contribute themselves?

Right. They can also go anywhere else on the website that they choose to go to. But if you direct them to your page, the first thing they are going to see is the candidates that you have chosen.

So this would be yet another way the Internet is changing campaign fundraising?

I think they have probably done a tremendous job raising money for candidates.

What’s your general thought on the campaign-finance system, as you have experienced it?

That’s a big question. I am not sure how to answer it.

Well, it’s sort of, looking at the 2008 race, the possibly $1 billion question we are trying to examine. Do you think the system could be improved by changes?

I am sure it can. I haven’t been in this long enough to have a comparison of anything that came before McCain-Feingold. By the time I got into it, McCain-Feingold was already in place. And I sometimes find it frightening how well I understand what the campaign limits are, both on federal and state level. I know here, in New York state, that the governor now is proposing legislation that would very much alter the campaign giving limits, which are huge in this state. It’s over $50,000 per individual, per candidate in the primary, and then the general election. [Governor] Eliot Spitzer has voluntarily reduced the limits of the contributions to $10,000 per individual, per primary and general election.

I have heard a lot of arguments on both sides of we should or we shouldn’t have limits. And some people say it doesn’t really matter that we have limits. Because people who might be able to write you a six-figure check can just as easily raise that money because of the circles in which they travel. And so they can very easily bundle large amounts of money. And some people say if we went back to not having any limits, but we just had to have full disclosure of where the money was coming from, maybe that would be better. I don’t know. This is where we are. So for right now, for this election, we are going to live with it. It is somewhat obscene that we raise all of this money so that Democrats can fight each other for the right to be the candidate. But I am not sure what the alternative is.

Draw names from a hat. Make them all play a game of Parcheesi or something.

I think when we first talked some months ago, I was probably muttering something about how they should all just fight it out politically. But it doesn’t work that way anymore. Because even to fight it out politically, it means you have to get on a plane and fly all over the country. And it’s not like you get a whole lot of direct flights that go from Iowa to South Carolina. So it means that you charter planes. You have a huge staff that you take around the country with you. It doesn’t come for free.

And with the compressed schedule we are seeing for 2008, even more so the candidates are going to have to be hitting an extremely large number of states in a short period of time. What, in your experience, motivates the people you raise money from to give? Is it the same kind of belief that you have, making things better?

I think a lot of people I know give because they want to support the candidate that they are writing a check to. I have raised a lot of money at very low dollar levels. I think that’s something that women, in general, have brought into this mix with these campaign-finance reform laws. In the Kerry campaign, we did a breakfast in New York City for, I think, several thousand women at a ticket of $250 that raised over $1 million.

When people give small checks, in a lot of cases, that’s a more meaningful contribution than somebody who can very easily write a large check, because somebody who is writing you a small check is choosing between writing that check or taking their kids out to dinner. That person’s going to give you their vote. And they may even go out and work for that candidate, as opposed to somebody who is writing you a $1,000 check or a $4,600 check. The commitment may also come along with that check. But let’s face it: A lot of those checks do come because somebody owes somebody else a favor, or somebody wants to get in a small room and has some other agenda attached to it. A $250 check gets you, usually, in a pretty big room.

Right. With several hundred of their closest friends.

Sometimes 1,000 of your closest friends, which can be a very awesome experience, by the way, especially when it’s 1,000 women — a very powerful feeling.

But not, generally, a great forum for lobbying a candidate on your issue of choice?

Not generally. But, for instance, Hillary is going to do a breakfast Monday, June 4. And it’s going to be done town-hall style. I call it kind of Iowa meets Manhattan. And that’s going to be, I think, a much more fun way to have 1,000 women in a room than your typical breakfast in a ballroom. I am sure she will make some remarks. But it’s going to be a Q & A format. So there will be an opportunity for dialogue there, I think. In the small, low-donor events, the real challenge is how do you make people feel like they are included and they have a voice?

What do you think are the most important issues, to you, that really motivate you to support someone or not support someone?

Now are you talking about issues?

Are there issues, to you, that make or break whether you would be likely to support a candidate? Is it a party designation? Is it based on your personal take on an individual candidate? What makes you decide whether someone is the person you are going to support or someone that you might wish good luck?

In the 2004 race, and in this race this year, it’s come down to qualifications for me. Now I think that in 2004 John Kerry was the candidate who was most qualified to be president. And I feel that way about Hillary. And I am sure, as the policy positions roll out, there will be points on which I will disagree. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect to find a candidate who is totally and completely in lockstep with everything that I think.

Unless you run yourself?

That would be a horrific thought to me. But I think that you find somebody that predominantly agrees with you, and who you feel will make good decisions in complex situations. And that’s how I made my choice.