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Fayetteville woman is on board with Obama
[February 03, 2008]

Fayetteville woman is on board with Obama


(Fayetteville Observer, The (Fayetteville, NC) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Feb. 3--Growing up in Fayetteville, Jenny Yeager planned to change the world.

At 28, she hopes she's doing that by working on the 2008 campaign for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Yeager is Obama's finance director for the states of New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. She has been with him for four years, since his Senate campaign in Illinois. The stakes are higher this time around.

"I just want him to win," she said. "Honestly, I did not get in this four years ago because I thought he would run for president. I really like him."

Obama scooped her up off the unemployment line in 2004 to be his deputy national finance director. Her role in the beginning was to raise money outside Illinois for his Senate bid.

"Personally, he has been unbelievably good to me. He has given me a ton of professional respect and a lot of responsibility," Yeager said. "I don't know many people in power who would hand over certain positions to someone my age."



During a telephone interview from her office on 59th Street and Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan, Yeager talked about life in the high-stakes political world that she orbits: the exhausting pace she's keeping in the presidential campaign, her inside take on a would-be president who doesn't take himself too seriously, and her passion and sense of pride in working to put Obama in the White House.

"I would see him winning as historic, not just because he's African-American," she said. "But what he's trying to do is historic, if not symbolic. He's asking everyone to adjust the way they think about politics. Trust again in their leaders and understand that this country -- it's really a great country, and there's no reason why we shouldn't be engaged and feel good about ourselves. That's what's historic about it."


Obama shares the front-runner status in the Democratic race with Hillary Rodham Clinton. She won in Florida on Tuesday, but that was a race that awarded no convention delegates. He notched a big win in South Carolina's primary last weekend.

The contests held in two days could be decisive. On Tuesday, 22 states will hold Democratic primaries or caucuses. More delegates can be won on Super Tuesday than on any other single day of the primary calendar.

Should Obama get the Democratic nomination and go on to win the general election on Nov. 4, Yeager said, she would be honored, if asked, to work on his staff. But she also said it would be bad luck to talk about it now.

"I just want to get through Feb. 5. That's about it," she said. "My career is solely dependent on helping him get elected. The rest will take care of itself, one way or another."

Sports fans

Yeager has more than politics in common with Obama. She said they share a dry sense of humor and an athletic past.

Both played reserve roles on winning high school basketball teams. She was a shooting guard on the Terry Sanford High School girls teams in the mid-1990s that featured future University of Connecticut All-American Shea Ralph. Obama and his teammates brought Punahou School the state championship in 1979, his senior year at the school in Hawaii.

Obama is still regarded as a wily player of pickup basketball.

"He's very competitive. I've traveled with him a lot," Yeager said. "When he won the Senate race, he moved to (Washington) D.C., and he had the whole staff over to watch the Carolina-Illinois NCAA championship game. I was the only Carolina fan. He knew that. He made me sit next to him so we could talk trash to each other."

The University of North Carolina won 75-70 that night.

Work ethic

Yeager learned the value of teamwork from her father, Bill Yeager, a longtime high school football coach in the Fayetteville area who is now on the staff at UNC-Pembroke, and from her years playing sports at Terry Sanford. Besides basketball, she threw the discus in track and played defender on the soccer team.

"She's big into teamwork, working together to achieve goals," said her mother, Chris Yeager. "You learn a lot of that from sports. The work ethic is big in sports, too."

Gil Bowman, the former girls basketball coach at Terry Sanford, remembers Yeager as a good shooter but a player who didn't have the most athletic talent on the team. She was thorough, though. Yeager knew what everyone on the floor was supposed to be doing.

"She could probably tell them better than I," Bowman said.

As a child, her mother said, Yeager tried to be a peacemaker. She didn't like conflict.

Yeager likes that about Obama, whom she says will not tolerate drama among his staff. "We all get along," she said.

Her parents aren't at all surprised that their cause-minded child ended up with a job in politics.

Jaime Matthews, a close friend for 16 years, says the same thing.

She and Jenny met in the seventh grade at Hillcrest Middle School, now Max Abbott Middle School. They played basketball together at Terry Sanford and, right after college, moved together to Washington.

"She's always been driven," said Matthews. "She's always been a hard worker and will do well at whatever she does. It's nice when a friend finds something she's very good at and passionate about at the same time."

But Yeager never really planned to work in politics.

After graduating from Terry Sanford in 1997, she attended UNC and earned her degree in business administration. In Washington, she found work with the Close Up Foundation, which brings together high school students from around the country to learn about government.

"My mother always gives me a hard time because she said I always wanted to save the world," she said. "I actually wanted to become a teacher. Working with young people and following in my parents' footsteps was something I wanted to do."

In March 2003, Yeager was hired to do advance and fund-raising work for John Edwards during his first run for president. She remained on his payroll through Super Tuesday 2004, when the Edwards campaign "let go of almost everyone. That's sort of the nature of the game."

"I think, a lot of times, politics is a pretty brutal game," she said.

Less than a month later, Obama hired Yeager in the wake of his come-from-behind Senate primary win in Illinois. His victory drew national coverage.

"I studied things in college that he worked on as a state senator," Yeager said. "I was already interested in him. I didn't intend to work in politics. I thought after my work with Edwards, I thought I was done. That if I was going to keep working in politics, that Barack would be the only person I would work for."

So in early April, she boarded the Obama bandwagon. "I had never been to Illinois," she said, "and I drove all the way out there to work for him. I had moved to Fayetteville for three weeks and was living with my family."

Later that year, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama became a familiar name to many Americans after he delivered a rousing keynote address.

"When he decided to run for president, they sort of asked us what we wanted to do," she said. "I knew this would be a huge challenge for a lot of reasons. I thought it would be hard, and I wanted to be here to do it for him."

Long hours

Since "all the craziness" of the campaign started, Chris Yeager said, her daughter puts in 13-hour days before heading home to her Manhattan apartment, some 30 blocks from the office.

Even then, she takes work home. She has a BlackBerry, a cell phone and a computer with her at all times.

"Insane," is how Yeager describes working in the middle of a presidential campaign. "It's the pace," she said. "But it's also if you care about this. You live it. It's not something you ever leave, even when you leave the office."

The staff she works with is a small one. Four staff members handle fund-raising efforts throughout New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Matthews said her friend has always been good at networking. Yeager is blessed with "a very genuine and honest quality" that people find endearing and real, she said.

As for the long campaign, Yeager said she's weathering it well. Same for her boss, who despite the stringent schedule finds time each night to chat with his two daughters over the telephone if he's not with them.

"He's learned quickly, and running for president is nothing you can understand until you do it," she said. "He's having a good time. He believes in what he's doing, and he knows who he is."

On the night of that college basketball championship game, back on April 4, 2005, Obama was a good sport following the Fighting Illinis' loss to Yeager's Tar Heels.

"He's not a sore loser," she said. "He stood up and we shook hands, like at the end of a tennis match. He definitely does not like to lose, but he didn't shout at the TV or anything."

She's doing what she can to see that he gets to be gracious in victory this time around.

Staff writer Michael Futch can be reached at [email protected] or 486-3529.

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