The deputy Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer
November 10, 2009
The deputy Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer:Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, is leaving the White House at the end of the month, sources tell ABC News. She will remain a consultant to the White House advising with long-term communications planning and other strategic issues.
Dunn will be replaced by the deputy communications director, Dan Pfeiffer.
Dunn’s departure was expected; she came on board temporarily earlier this year when communications director Ellen Moran left for a more family-friendly position at the Department of Commerce. Dunn, who advised then-Sen. Obama during the campaign, always said she was here temporarily because she wants to spend more time with her teenage son.
Pfeiffer, a Georgetown alumnus from Delaware, originally worked for the presidential campaign of Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind, but became the Obama campaign communications director after Bayh dropped out. He has worked for former Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-SD, and Sen. Tim Johnson, D-SD, and is married to Sarah Feinberg, senior advisor to chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and a special assistant to the president.
There have been discussions at the White House about Dunn’s husband, Bob Bauer, replacing White House counsel Greg Craig. Today’s move presumably makes that switch more likely..
Anita Dunn Mao Tse Tung,Anita Dunn Mao
October 16, 2009
Anita Dunn Mao Tse Tung,Anita Dunn Mao:Here’s a video from Glenn Beck which seems to show interim White House communications director Anita Dunn listing two of her “favorite political philosophers” in a speech: Mother Teresa and… Mao Tse Tung.
(Skip to 4:10 for the Anita Dunn clip)
Dunn initially juxtaposes the two to make it a joke. “Not often coupled with each other,” she says, to a few laughs. Dave Weigel thinks the whole thing’s a joke that everyone but Glenn Beck gets.
At that point in the video, it is clearly a joke. But then Dunn goes into a somewhat long history of Mao and Chiang Kai Shek in 1947 that’s a little bit too bright, and a little too hagiographic. It suggests that she was in fact not joking that Mao is one of her favorite political philosophers. The joke was the juxtaposition between him and Mother Teresa, not her beliefs. Her love of Mao’s political philosophy, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be one of the speech’s jokes.more info
