Robert Mosbacher’s star is rising. Again.
“I’m trying to wipe the smile off my face, but it just won’t go way,” he told the Dallas Morning News earlier this week, as his staffers worked the phones to move former supporters of Rudy Giuliani to the McCain camp.
The Texas oil man and former commerce secretary stepped in as general chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign last August, when it was near collapse. Mosbacher assumed major responsibilities for rebuilding the campaign’s finances and refocusing its message to voters.
Now he and his candidate are riding high, hoping for better results than in 1992, when Mosbacher chaired the elder George Bush’s failed re-election bid.
With fundraising experience going back to the Gerald Ford days, Mosbacher has deep roots in the Republican money network.
He served as George H.W. Bush’s chief fundraiser in the first Bush presidential race, rounding up wealthy contributors who made soft-money donations to state GOP committees. When former Secretary of State James A. Baker stepped in to try to salvage the re-election campaign, Mosbacher moved to the Republican National Committee, where he was finance chairman.
He was a director, and later a consultant, to the Enron Corporation in the 1990s. Mosbacher currently chairs Mosbacher Energy Company, where his son, Robert Jr., is president.
Robert Jr. also heads the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a federal agency that helps American businesses invest overseas. He has had a couple of disappointing political campaigns, running unsuccessfully for Houston mayor in 1997, and for lieutenant governor of Texas in 1990.
Dr. Diane Mosbacher, daughter of Robert Sr. and the late Jane Mosbacher, has made a film about her parents coming to terms with the her homosexuality. Diane, known as Dee, married Dr. Nanette Kathryn Gartrell in British Columbia in 2005.
Robert Sr.’s wife, Mica, was named a University of Houston regent this week. She also headed the inaugural festivities last year for Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
His ex-wife, Georgette Mosbacher, is a Republican loyalist who made a fortune in cosmetics and dated Fred Thompson. According to the New York Times, she hates the word “socialite.”
Seven years ago, the Times published a story about her, headlined, “Is Georgette Mosbacher Too Hot for the G.O.P. to Handle?”
One of her great failings, Times writer Cathy Horyn said then, was her support of McCain in the Republican primary. “That, if nothing else, is proof that the Republican hostess and fund-raiser may have had the bread, but she didn’t know which side to butter it on,” Horyn wrote.
Times may have have changed for the extended Mosbacher clan.
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