Betsy Myers: Change Operator
by Ben Branham, News Editor on February 12, 2008 in Features
“I think there’s like five of us in the whole campaign who have children - out of 700.”
Betsy Myers wasn’t exactly looking for a reason to leave her position as executive director of the Kennedy’s School’s Center for Public Leadership (CPL) last winter when the incipient Obama campaign came looking for a chief operating officer.
As the mother of a five-year-old girl, Myers wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of commuting back and forth between Chicago and Boston. But she couldn’t resist the opportunity to work for the type of leader she and her colleagues had long been talking about.
“The passion I have about leadership is one of the reasons I was able to leave the job and community I loved to go work for such a great leader,” Myers said of her decision at a CPL-sponsored event on February 7.
It was Obama’s personal appeal to her in describing his desire for a campaign that was “grassroots, low-drama, buttoned-up, and run like a business,” that convinced Myers that, even if it didn’t succeed, it promised to set a new standard in electoral politics. Which is exactly what Myers set about doing when she started work in January 2007. Her first three hires, which included the directors of finance, human resources and travel, were all previously stay-at-home moms ready to re-enter the workforce and whose backgrounds included business and operations-but not campaigns.
Beyond staffing, her role has included overseeing the logistics of a wide variety of tasks including: populating the campaign’s massive database with new names, outreaching to undecided women voters, and coordinating supporter housing for the legion of eager volunteers.
“The only perk I get as COO is I get to stay in a hotel and I get my own room. But that’s it,” she joked.
Indeed, Myers acknowledges that the exhaustive campaign lifestyle isn’t as easy to manage as it was when she began her political career with the Mondale/Ferraro presidential campaign in 1984.
“I would be lying to you if I didn’t tell you my family has suffered,” she told a packed room. “I don’t think [my husband and I] had a clue, even being in politics for 20 years, of the toll it would take on my daughter.”
Still, Myers, who worked in the Clinton administration prior coming to the Kennedy School as a mid-career MPA student in 1999, is happy with the decision she made and grateful for the opportunity it has given her to enhance her career. Seeing herself as “more of a public liaison,” however, she may pass off the “detail-oriented” COO role to someone else if Obama wins the nomination. If she does not return to Washington as part of an Obama administration, she hopes to have the chance to come back to Harvard - and help train that next generation of leaders.
Written by Ben Branham, News Editor · Filed Under Features
Ben Branham (MPP2) is News Editor of the Citizen. Prior to his time at the Harvard Kennedy School, Branham worked as a press secretary in the administration of New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. He spent last summer creating “One Vote Under God” (www.onevoteundergod.org), a web matrix documenting the role of faith and religion in the 2008 presidential campaign as part of the national News21 initiative (newsinitiative.org). He attended college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he majored in English. Other past jobs include waiting tables, mowing lawns, giving tours, and selling pies to raise money for people with HIV/AIDS. Originally from Chicago, Branham now lives in Cambridge, MA with no pets. He's a Scorpio.
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