FEBRUARY 2009

obama’s community connection
Peter Dagher key part of transitional team
By Joyce Wiswell
When Peter Dagher heard
that Barack Obama was
going to run for president,
he knew he had to be part of
the quest.
Although he had worked on Bill
Clinton’s campaign and served on
his first White House transition
committee, Dagher passed on an
offer to campaign for Hillary Clinton.
“I didn’t think Hillary could
win,” said Dagher, a firstgeneration
American whose
mother is Chaldean and father
is Lebanese. “But I knew
if we put our heads down and
stuck to our message, we
were going to win it with
Obama.”
Dagher was named manager
of Obama’s national
campaign headquarters in
Chicago in February 2007.
“I thought about it for a
day — do I really want to get
back into this? — but I knew
it was yes,” recalled the veteran
of both of Bill Clinton’s
presidential elections. “It was 90-
hour weeks for the first eight weeks,
then 55 to 60 hours. It’s never been
below 55 hours.”
When Obama was elected last
November, Dagher became operations
manager of the Presidential
Transition Team. Now, he’s running
for U.S. Congress to fill the
spot left vacant by Rahm Emanuel,
who is now Obama’s chief of staff.
This will be Dagher’s second shot
at the seat; he came in third in
an eight-person race in 2002 that
Emanuel won.
The primary is on March 3 and
the general election on April 7.
Dagher was offered a post in the
Obama administration but said he
prefers holding elected office.
“I would do a lot more good
for our people than I could in the
administration, and I do not just
mean Chaldeans or Assyrians or
Lebanese Christians, but the taxpayers,”
he said. “I’ve already been
told that if I don’t win I’m in with
the Obama Administration, but I
like working without a net and I
don’t want to play with that.”
In the Beginning
Dagher said he liked Obama from
the start when the then-candidate
for U.S. Senate spoke to the Assyrian
National Council of Illinois,
about a month before the Iraq War
started in March 2003.
“This was before anyone knew
who Obama was – there were only
30 or 40 people in the audience,”
Dagher said. “He said, ‘I’m not
against all wars but I’m against this
war,’ and everyone booed him. He
said, ‘who is going to suffer the most
once Saddam is removed? Who are
the people in the weakest position?
The weakest are the Christians.’”
Obama went on to question the
United States’ plan for Iraq once
Saddam was removed from power, a
plan that apparently never existed.
“Here’s someone who did not have
the same access to the intelligence
as Hillary Clinton, but [she and
the rest of Congress] all voted for
this war thinking it was the politically
expedient thing to do,” Dagher
said.
A Varied Career
Dagher, 43, has had an eclectic career.
In late 2004, he became an election
coordinator and media liaison
with the International Organization
for Migration (IOM), a United Nations-sponsored
group that assisted
the Iraqi Interim Government with
the country’s first-ever democratic
election after Saddam fell. He has
also been a special projects manager
in the White House, where he
implemented the 2000 Presidential
Transition Act; a special assistant
to the U.S. Secretary of Transportation;
and a one-time operations director
for the Democratic National
Committee.
Before joining the Obama campaign,
Dagher was vice president
for business development of National
Source Energy Systems (now
Seraph), which specialized in solar
power and biofuels, where he managed
marketing operations for several
companies.
To make an impact in Washington,
fundraising is essential for any
cause said Dagher, who believes the
Chaldean community needs to pony
up more when it comes to political
campaigns.
“With the amount of money our
community has we should be able to
place candidates in the major markets
– New York; Chicago; Detroit;
Modesto, California,” he said.
The community also needs to put
a common face before the world, he
believes. Instead of political infighting
among Christian groups and arguments
over the terms “Chaldean,”
“I would do a lot more good for our people than I
could in the administration, and I do not just mean
Chaldeans or Assyrians or Lebanese Christians,
but the taxpayers…I’ve already been told that if I
don’t win I’m in with the Obama Administration,
but I like working without a net and I don’t want to
play with that.” – peter Dagher
“Assyrian” and “Syriac,” Iraqi Christians
(the term Dagher prefers) could
learn a lot from the Jewish community,
he said.
“At the end of World War II Jews
had their differences between the
Orthodox, Reform and Conservative
movements,” Dagher said, but
they banded together on key issues
— establishing Israel as a homeland,
creating the powerful lobbying group
AIPAC (Israeli American Public Affairs
Committee) and actively supporting
candidates sympathetic to
their causes. “They said, we’ll fight
about the rest internally,” Dagher
said. “On those issues, they pushed it
and they got it done.
“The Jews have laid out a plan
for us; they are 50-60 years ahead
of us,” Dagher added. “Assyrians already
invented the wheel, why are
we trying to reinvent it? We need to
pick three, four, five things we agree
on and then fund them. If we build a
base in Congress, a powerhouse lobbying
level, we will never have to
worry about our people again.”
Creating awareness starts with
defining Iraqi Christians to the
rest of the population, Dagher said.
“Christians are lumped in with Arabs
and that’s a problem,” he said.
“We have not done a good-enough
job in identifying ourselves.”
Another page from the Jewish
playbook that Dagher admires
involves sending young people to
28 CHALDEAN NEWS FEBRUARY 2009