Making Sense of the 2008 Elections

Former Congressman Vin Weber, Obama’s Minnesota State Director Jeff Blodgett, and political scientist and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance Larry Jacobs analyzed the outcome of the presidential election and Minnesota’s local and Congressional races. Jeff Blodgett is the Minnesota State Director for Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Blodgett took a formal leave from his current job as Executive Director of Wellstone Action to work on the Obama campaign. Blodgett has over 25 years of experience in community organizing and political management. Blodgett trains, teaches, and writes extensively on political skills, public management and leadership. Jeff was a student of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone at Carleton College and began his career as a community organizer, working with family farmers during the 1980s farm crisis. He later spent 13 years as a senior aide, adviser, and campaign manager to the senator from 1989 to 2002, managing all three of his election campaigns. Jeff has served in key positions in dozens of other campaigns, including a post as senior adviser for Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar’s 2006 race, and get-out-the-vote director for the 2004 Kerry Campaign in Minnesota. He earned his Master of Public Administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in 1998. Vin Weber is a senior fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and former co-director of the Policy Fellows program. He served in Congress from 1981 to 1993, representing Minnesota’s Second Congressional District. He is a partner at Clark & Weinstock, a consulting firm that provides strategic advice to institutions with matters before the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. Prior to Clark & Weinstock’s, Weber was president — and co-director with Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Bill Bennett — of Empower America, a public policy advocacy group. He is a trustee of the German Marshall Fund, co-director of the Aspen Institute’s Domestic Policy Project, member of the Visiting Committee for the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and council member of the National Council for Political Management at George Washington University. In 2001, he was elected chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a private, nonprofit organization designed to strengthen democratic institutions around the world through nongovernmental efforts. Weber is a regular commentator on National Public Radio and is often sought as a political analyst for network programs such as CNN’s Capital Gang