Politics
He was an early financial supporter of President Bill Clinton. In 2001 he had a falling out with the former president over Clinton's decision to not pardon Leonard Peltier, on whose behalf he had lobbied the President.
Geffen was an early supporter of Barack Obama for president and raised $1.3 million for Obama in a star-studded Beverly Hills fund raiser. On February 21, 2007, in an interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Geffen described Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton in unflattering terms: "Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it's troubling." He said that Hillary Clinton was "incredibly polarizing" and described Bill Clinton as "reckless" and cast doubt on those who say he has become a different person since leaving office.
Along with other celebrities including Steven Spielberg and Brad Pitt, Geffen donated money to stop Proposition 8 from becoming law in California.
Read more about this topic: David Geffen
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.”
—J.B.S. (John Burdon Sanderson)
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)