July 14, 2007
Clinton Backer’s Ties to Powerful Cut Both Ways
By MIKE McINTIRE
Many wealthy people have raised money for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign. But only Vinod Gupta has named a school building in India after her.
The Hillary Rodham Clinton Mass Communication Center, when it is finished, will complement the William Jefferson Clinton Science and Technology Center, another Gupta project in India. A video of Mr. Clinton visiting there can be found on the Vin Gupta page at YouTube.com — not to be confused with vingupta .com, where until recently one could find photos of Mr. Gupta golfing with the former president in Scotland and socializing with Senator Clinton in Aspen, Colo.
Such images are trophies for Mr. Gupta, an Indian-American entrepreneur who has spent much of his professional life cultivating close ties to politicians, mostly Democrats, that have benefited him in ways large and small. For the Democrats, he became a valued rainmaker, contributing nearly $1 million to the Clintons and other candidates from the 1980s on.
But if he normally wears his friendship with the Clintons on his sleeve, it has been a lot less visible lately. The Clinton campaign began to distance itself from Mr. Gupta after reports that his data-marketing company, infoUSA, sold call lists to unscrupulous telemarketers, and accusations that he wasted millions of dollars on perks for himself and the Clintons. Mr. Gupta, in turn, skipped a Clinton fund-raiser he helped put together last month in New York, and now says he is no longer involved in the campaign.
“With all this publicity,” he said, “to be frank with you, it just isn’t worth it.”
Mr. Gupta says he has done nothing wrong, and it remains to be seen whether he has indeed bowed out of big-time politics for good. But in the modern era of political money, where the race for cash has effectively become a campaign unto itself, Mr. Gupta’s entwinements with the Democrats, and his abrupt step back, illustrate the pitfalls of such relationships, both for the candidates and for the wealthy contributors who hunger for the access and the attention their largess can bring.
Mr. Gupta, who arrived in Nebraska from India in 1967, was unusually successful in working his way into the Democratic fold, to the point where he found himself sleeping in the Clinton White House, vacationing with the former president and appointing the Democratic chairman, Terry McAuliffe, to the board of one of his companies. He gave consulting contracts worth $3 million to Mr. Clinton, and recently hired the son of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Because of those close links with Democrats, he stirred conflict-of-interest questions by buying a company that does presidential polling for CNN.more...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/14/us/politics/14gupta.html?pagewanted=print
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