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Arab-American signs on as co-chair of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign

By Associated Press
International Herald Tribune
Posted on Tuesday March 27, 2007

CONCORD, New Hampshire: One of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s top supporters says if the Democrat wins the White House, he wants to be part of her team negotiating peace in the Middle East.

Bill Shaheen, a second-generation Lebanese American who is married to former New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, last week joined Clinton as co-chairman of her national and state campaigns. He told The Associated Press on Tuesday that reports that he withheld his endorsement until he was promised an ambassadorship were wrong.

“Did she promise (an ambassadorship)? No,” Shaheen said. “That’s not how I work. I don’t think Senator Clinton is thinking that far down the road and I would be disappointed if she was.”

Shaheen helped run Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in 1976 and went to the Palestinian territories last year as an election monitor for the Carter Center. Shaheen is considered one of New Hampshire’s political kingmakers and helped run the New Hampshire campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry.

Shaheen met with bloggers after a news conference announcing his endorsement last week. One blog, GreenMountainPolitics1, quoted Shaheen as saying Clinton promised to make him her Middle East envoy.

“The only thing I made Hillary promise in return for helping on her campaign is that she will send me over to the Middle East to help her work for peace in the region,” blogger Chris Stewart quoted Shaheen as saying.

In an interview Tuesday, Stewart said Shaheen never used the word “ambassador.”

The blog BlueHampshire quoted Shaheen as saying: “I said if I do all this for you, I only want one thing: I want to be on that team that brings peace to the Middle East. I believe in it. I don’t need to get paid. I just want to be on that team.”

Mike Caulfield, who posted the BlueHampshire entry, said his quotes are accurate and Shaheen did not say Clinton had made any promises.

“My impression is that he was not presenting it as a quid pro quo,” Caulfield said. “He never said anything about what Hillary said back to that.”