Who Is Stacey Lawson?

Grab your hanky: there’s another rich Silicon Valley-type feeling “disenfranchised” by the system. Stacey Lawson, a candidate in California’s newly drawn 2nd Congressional District which runs from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border, is trying to explain why she can’t seem to find the time in her busy schedule to vote. Can’t even mail one in during the four-week absentee ballot period.

How does this keep happening? We all know about Meg Whitman, and now we have Stacey Lawson. Here’s what the local press is saying this week. Let's start with the Chronicle (April 15):

…like another wealthy neophyte business executive candidate, 2010 Republican gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman, Lawson has a poor voting record. According to elections records in San Francisco, where she lived before moving to Marin County almost three years ago, she voted only four times in 12 elections between October 2003 and November 2008.

She didn't vote in the November 2008 election when Obama was elected and California voters passed Proposition 8, which outlawed same-sex marriage in the state.

[Lawson told The Chronicle] "For some time, like many citizens across the country, I felt disenfranchised and not feeling like my vote mattered."

She doesn't come off any better in the newspapers in the district. Two days later she told the Marin Independent Journal she was wrong: "Probably like a fair number of Americans, part of that time I didn't really feel like my vote mattered that much. I was wrong in that perception." Good she realizes she was wrong now... but that doesn't mean she should jump from a non-voter to a Member of Congress overnight. Even if she is the richest candidate.

The next day she was whining to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and again to the Marin Independent Journal about her "mistake" and her self-imposed disenfrachisement

“It was definitely a mistake not to vote consistently," Lawson said Tuesday. Lawson said, as she has previously, that at the time she was disenchanted with the political process and thought she could do more outside of politics. Lawson may have been turned off by politics; nevertheless, in 2007 she graduated from Emerge America, an organization that trains and encourages women to run for office.

How is it that a multimillionaire possibly feels disenfranchised by the system? Lawson is fond of saying how she’s the daughter of a truck driver from Port Angeles, Washington. She’s trying to find common ground with voters in the northern part of the newly redrawn district, where the median income is about $35k/year compared to the $85k/ year median income of her own Marin County where she’s lived for the past three years. Oh yeah, you may be wondering why this Silicon Valley girl is running for office north of the Golden Gate Bridge-– she just moved there from San Francisco. She barely knows the place, so maybe that’s why she’s arrogant enough to think she can just buy the seat.

After her truck driving daddy started his own business and became a success-- he even owns a small private airport in Port Angeles, WA-- princess Stacey stays local, goes to University of Washington, and then she starts to climb the corporate ladder: first is Deloitte and Touche, next is the oldest tech company in the world, IBM. In 1996 she goes to Harvard Business School. Feeling disenfranchised then?

After Harvard BS, she launches a start up called InPart, which she sells about two years later for a cool $60 million, pocketing $6,000,000 in the process. She was 29 years old. Feeling disenfranchised yet?

Maybe she was a little restless, because after she became a multimillionaire, Lawson went to work for Siebel Systems, a few years before they were bought by Silicon Valley giant Oracle. This is presumably where she met Thomas Siebel, father of Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the filmmaker and actress who recently made the “2011 Sundance documentary film Miss Representation, which explores how the media’s misrepresentations of women have led to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence.” The younger Siebel Newson made a minor splash recently by not endorsing the same candidate as her Lieutenant Governor and former Mayor of San Francisco husband Gavin Newsom-- instead Ms. Newsom endorsed the non-voting Lawson. I hope Ms. Jennifer Siebel Newsom felt enfranchised enough to vote for her husband, whether or not her friend Stacey felt the stirrings of civic responsibility during those elections is another story. But hey, what’s a poor voting history between multimillionaire friends?

After the Oracle takeover of Siebel, Lawson wanders around and she does what other Silicon Valley cash-outs have done before-- she finds a guru: Baskaran Pillai.

At this point, the arc of her life seems to go from corporate board rooms into the mystical. She starts a blog on the Huffington Post called “Conscious Living” with column headlines such as “Igniting the Modern Mystic,” “Knowledge is Bondage” and “New Dreams or Old Karma: What Will You Create in 2008?” Karma indeed…

After spending her twenties making her millions, Lawson spends her thirties working with her guru, writing more than 40 new agey advice columns for HuffPo and she co-founds the Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology at UC Berkeley in 2004. Sounds like a nice way to spend your early retirement fortune-- but she’s still not voting during this lovely time.

One other item of note during her thirties-- she joins the Board of a little company called Chelsey Henry, which she called a “social venture” after it was revealed the company failed to pay federal payroll taxes and was bankrupt for a time.

Lawson justified the failure to pay taxes and bankruptcy this way to the Marin
Independent Journal on April 18:

Asked about the unpaid payroll taxes after the debate, Lawson said, "There were discrepancies by the management team that when the board found out we reprimanded them and put them on a path to paying those liabilities. So those were actually paid down in due course."

Lawson confirmed that Chelsey Henry filed for bankruptcy during the economic downturn and went out of business, so some creditors may not have been paid all they were owed.

"The jobs were created in America," Lawson said. "They worked with a Chinese factory, and 10 percent of their earnings were given to women's causes. So it was a social venture."

Oopsy-doopsy... a little correction to the Marin Independent Journal on April 19:

Congressional candidate Stacey Lawson, correcting a previous statement, now says that a company that ran into financial difficulties and failed to pay payroll taxes while she was helping to oversee it did not permanently go out of business.

...Responding to questions after Tuesday's debate, Lawson said that Chelsey Henry had filed for bankruptcy and ceased operations. But she later said that statement was incorrect.

"The company’s assets and brand were acquired by their largest creditor, and they continue to operate the company under new ownership," Lawson said. She said some other creditors ended up not getting paid...“The surviving company is still in the process of paying the owed payroll
taxes, Lawson said.”

Phew… all those jobs in China are safe. Good news, unless you’re an American manufacturing worker, or an unpaid creditor, or a taxpayer. How she forgot this company was still in business is beyond me. Must be that same gene that forgot when it was Election Day. And let’s not forget this gem so aptly reported in the same article:

Lawson, who became a millionaire helping manufacturing companies tailor their operations for the Internet, has touted her business experience and created a 50-page economic plan titled Making More in America, which calls for more manufacturing in the United States.

Did I compare her Meg Whitman? Maybe just in voting record, because her business success seems more like a combination of Mitt Romney and dumb luck than any skill set she can actually take to Congress.

And Making More in America is the title of Lawson’s economic plan? Where were manufacturing those jobs created again? Oh that’s right, in China!

Now that she’s turned forty, she’s decided to grace the world with her political acumen. She found a nearby aging Member of Congress looking to retire, and Stacey bolted into the district the first chance she got.

With a whopping three years in residence, she’s running to represent one of the best voting districts in the state, if not the country. Can you believe it? She wants to be their "Representative" in Congress. Ha! Take that pesky disenfranchised thirty-something Stacey Lawson… Forty-something Stacey Lawson is making amends, and the poor people of CA-CD2 are just going to have to deal with it, because she’s raised more money than God.

Oh yeah, the money. As an EMILY’s List donor/candidate, she’s raised it by the truckful. More than 40% of it has been from out of state, and a full 83% from outside her actual “home” district. Then there’s the general election money-- you know the money she can’t touch unless she makes it past the June primary-- that totals $145,000 coming from 58 individuals who gave the extra $2,500 per donor above what they’re allowed to give for the June 5 primary. That money is off the table, for now, but her corporate cronies have still helped her bring in $595,000 of primary election cash. Did I say “corporate cronies”? Sorry, to clarify… Even though Ms. Lawson is an Emily’s List candidate, if you scour her donor list, you’ll see it populated by bankers, investors, developers, other corporate executives and CEOs and one maxed out guru! ‘Tis good to be the guru (and the guru’s protégé).

So there you have it: Stacey Lawson in a nutshell…

• After not voting in the most high profile election in our lifetime which elected this country’s first African American President
• And on the same ballot as Prop 8, which reversed same-sex marriage in the state
• And included an anti-choice measure (Prop 4) that she didn’t vote on
• Nor did she vote on an animal rights measure (Prop 2)
• Nor on a bond to help fund Children’s Hospitals (Prop 3)
• And after overseeing a company that sent manufacturing jobs to China
• And failed to pay payroll taxes
• And almost went bankrupt (which she first thought did go bankrupt, before she remembered it didn’t)
• She’s now ready to serve her new district in Congress. After all, she just moved there three years ago.

If it hasn’t been said before, I’ll say it: Stacey Lawson needs to drop out of this race. The last person we need “representing” us in Congress is Stacey Lawson.