Rumoured New US Ambassador To UN In Geneva A Major Obama Fundraiser

A Northern California academic and a top national fundraiser for President Obama may be the next US ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, according to sources. Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, wife of eBay CEO and President John Donahoe, holds a law degree, two master’s degrees and a PhD, and is rumoured to be the nominee for the post empty since January.

Donahoe holds a law degree from Stanford University, a PhD in ethics and social theory from the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union, a master’s in East Asian Studies from Stanford and a master’s in theology from Harvard University.

Donahoe was chair of the National Women for Obama Finance Committee, and according to several sources raised at least US$500,000 for the president during his candidacy (see, for example, here, here, and here) as a ‘bundler,’ or someone who organises and gathers funds on behalf of other supporters.

An article on Donahoe published in Bloomberg News in September 2008 depicts her as an early fan of Senator Obama, offering to raise money for him before he announced his candidacy. She was reported to have raised nearly a half million dollars in a single event at her northern California home in 2007, and over a million dollars for Obama during his campaign, making her one of the campaign’s top six bundlers.

She also is involved in energy and environment issues. Dohahoe signed a 2008 letter from environmentalists in support of Obama, which praised the then-senator’s support of renewable energy, including low carbon alternatives to fossil fuels. She signed as a member of E2 Environmental Entrepreneurs, an advocacy group that bills itself “the independent business voice for the environment.”

But prior to her show of support for Obama, Donahoe’s experience included some other political work, such as fundraising for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004. According to the Huffington Post, she has also contributed to several congressional campaigns.

She is an affiliated scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, where she researches humanitarian military intervention (also the topic of her PhD dissertation at Berkeley).

An excerpt from her 25-year reunion [pdf] at her undergraduate university Dartmouth College reveals that Donahoe – apparently nicknamed Muffin – had spent “much of the past several decades either with my kids or in school myself.”

She previously served as a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School, was a high-tech litigation attorney at Fenwick & West in Palo Alto, California, which has an intellectual property practice, and clerked at the US Federal District Court in Northern California.

William Fenwick is an IP attorney who also blogs on the intersection of technology and Zen aesthetics at ValleyZen.com. Fenwick and his coblogger, Drue Kataoka, wrote after talking to Donahoe at an August 2008 Obama fundraiser: “Donahoe told me, ‘Barack has a natural Zen approach to things – he is calm and curious – does not get flustered easily, and is inclined to come up with creative new ways to find solutions that have not occurred to others before.’

She graduated from her PhD programme in 2006 having written her thesis on the moral and ethical framework military interventions for humanitarian purposes. “It’s not that I’m advocating war, but there are cases where military force might be necessary, and we’d better have a rational or ethical way to decide whether it’s just or not,” she said in an article on the dissertation published in the school newspaper.

Of her varied academic experiences, she said in the same article, “I started with the big philosophical questions and in the end I was doing policy work.”

In early 2009, she was named “woman of the year” by Emerge, a training programme aimed at increasing the number of Democratic women in public office.

If approved, she would replace Amb. Warren Tichenor, a “self described optimist” and Texan who served as the ambassador from 2006 to early 2009.