Anita Dunn

Life and career

Dunn was raised in Bethesda, Maryland, the daughter of Albert E. Babbitt and Carol Hutto Babbitt. Her father's brother was the modernist composer, Milton Babbitt. She began her career in the Carter White House, first as an intern for White House Communications Director Gerald Rafshoon and then worked for chief of staff Hamilton Jordan.

She worked on the campaign of Senator John Glenn (D-OH) in 1984, and on Capitol Hill before joining the firm founded by Bob Squier and William Knapp in 1993. She has been the adviser to Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ), including serving as the chief strategist for his presidential campaign, Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN), former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD). In 2004, Anita produced the media for Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D-TX). She was hired by then-Senator Barack Obama in 2006 to direct communications and strategy for his political action committee, The Hopefund. This move signaled to many that Obama was planning to run for the presidency. While advising Hopefund and Obama in 2006, she was instrumental in the preparations for the launch of Obama for America, and brought many key staffers to the Obama campaign with whom she had worked in Bayh's and Daschle's offices.

Obama campaign

In April 2008, it was announced that Dunn, who had joined the Obama campaign in February, would be the director of communications, policy and research operations for Obama for America, where she held the title Senior Adviser and was one of the major decision makers of the Obama campaign. She was featured as one of four top advisers (along with David Axelrod, David Plouffe, and Robert Gibbs) in a 60 Minutes interview held after then President-elect Obama's November 4, 2008 victory speech at Grant Park, Chicago, Illinois. She was described, in the 60 Minutes interview, as, "a relative newcomer who handled communications, research and policy." During the presidential transition of 2008-09, Dunn trained White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

White House Communications Director

Dunn served as interim White House Communications Director. She took the lead in the Obama administration's criticism of the Fox News Channel. On Sunday, October 11, 2009, she appeared on CNN's Reliable Sources and was asked to clarify a statement she made to Time magazine regarding Fox News, "it's opinion journalism masquerading as news."

She responded by saying, "if you were a Fox News viewer in the fall election, what you would have seen would have been that the biggest stories and biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and something called ACORN. The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party."

She added, "And it's not ideological. Obviously, there are many commentators who have conservative, liberal, centrist, and everybody understands that. But I think what is fair to say about FOX and certainly the way we view it is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party."

Dunn left her interim post at the end of November 2009 and was replaced by her deputy Dan Pfeiffer.

After leaving the White House, Dunn rejoined SKDK. She has maintained strong connections with the administration and White House records show that she has visited there over 100 times since 2009. The firm added many Obama administration insiders. Criticism has been raised about some of the clients represented by the firm. In particular, SKDKnickerbocker corporate clients include such controversial companies as the for-profit Kaplan University and TransCanada Corp., the developer of the Keystone XL pipeline. The progressive social change organization CredoAction mounted a petition calling on Ms. Dunn to stop working on behalf of TransCanada calling it a "betrayal of the commitments that so many of us worked so hard for, and that Dunn herself played a huge role in shaping."

2012 Obama campaign

During the 2012 Obama campaign, Dunn helped Obama prepare for the debates.

Personal life

Dunn is married to Robert Bauer, former partner at Perkins Coie and former personal counsel to President Obama and the White House Counsel. Bauer has also been the general counsel of Obama for America since January 2007.

In 2008, Newsweek named Dunn and Bauer the new "power couple" in Washington, D.C.