2008 Presidential Election Project Talks Policy

In the past two weeks, NACo has taken the 2008 Presidential Election Project on the road. NACo launched the Election Project to get county officials more involved in the Presidential Election process and to educate the candidates about county issues.

To reach that goal, NACo Executive Director Larry Naake and Legislative Director Ed Rosado have recently traveled to meet with policy staff for Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. In Boston, the NACo team met with Mitt Romney’s Policy Director Sally Canfield and the Director of Policy Development Jim Bognet. Jim came to the Romney campaign from Governor Schwartznegger’s office and was very familiar with the rols of counties due to the work of CSAC.

Representing Obama’s campaign were Deputy Policy Directors Danielle Gray and Carlos Monje as well as Madhuri Kommareddi. Both Carlos and Madhuri had previously worked in Obama’s Senate office.

Both meetings went very well and served as a starting point to open the dialogue between the campaigns and NACo policy experts. The campaigns seem receptive to NACo’s issues and to working together to restore the partnership. While the meetings focused largely on health care, infrastructure and justice, both campaigns said that they looked forward to working with NACo on an array of issues. Naake encouraged the campaigns to use NACo as a resource offering the same help that we’ve offered other candidates – research, demographic data, background on county issues and connecting them to our members to discuss how their policies would affect county governments.

Naake and Rosado have previously met with representatives of the McCain and Clinton campaigns. Efforts have been made to reach out to other policy staff and we continue to work on scheduling those meetings.