President Obama nominated longtime fundraiser and hotel heiress Penny Pritzker on Thursday to run the Commerce Department, gambling that her role in a failed bank, her personal finances and opposition from labor groups won’t derail her Senate confirmation.
The president also named national security aide Michael Froman as the next U.S. trade representative, rounding out the major appointments for his second term.
The nominations complete the president’s second-term Cabinet, which faced early criticism from some minority groups for a lack of diversity. If the Senate confirms Ms. Pritzker, she will be the fourth woman in the Cabinet. Mr. Obama on Monday nominated Anthony Foxx, the black mayor of Charlotte, N.C., to become transportation secretary. If confirmed, he would be the second black in the president’s Cabinet, joining Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
Ms. Pritzker, whose father founded the Hyatt hotel chain, has a net worth of $1.85 billion and gave crucial financial backing for Mr. Obama’s rise from an obscure Illinois state senator to president. She raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his presidential campaigns, and served as finance chairwoman for Mr. Obama’s race in 2008.
“Penny is one of our country’s most distinguished business leaders,” Mr. Obama said in an announcement in the White House Rose Garden.
National Association of Manufacturers President and CEO Jay Timmons hailed her nomination.
“Penny brings to the table an extensive business background and understands what it takes for businesses to create jobs,” he said.
But Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said he plans to question Ms. Pritzker about her use of offshore tax havens.
“Every nominee’s offshore tax-avoidance activities should be examined as part of the nomination process,” Mr. Grassley said. “This is the second nominee in a row, [Treasury Secretary] Jack Lew being the first, who’s associated with the kind of tax avoidance activity that the president dismisses as fat-cat shenanigans for others. It’s hypocritical to overlook tax avoidance when it’s convenient.”
Ms. Pritzker, who celebrated her birthday Thursday, could also face scrutiny in the Senate over the collapse of Superior Bank, which was co-owned by her family. The Hinsdale, Ill.-based bank was involved in subprime mortgage lending, and its failure in 2001 prompted accusations of mismanagement and fraud. About 1,400 customers lost part of their savings.
Campaign issue
When Ms. Pritzker came under fire during the 2008 presidential race for the bank’s collapse, the Obama campaign and her attorney said she had stepped down from the bank’s day-to-day management in 1994. But she wrote a letter as late as May 2001 urging the bank to make an expanded push into subprime loans in an effort to save itself.
She wrote that her family was recapitalizing the bank and pledged to “once again restore Superior’s leadership position in subprime lending.” Regulators shut down the bank two months later.
Ms. Pritzker said in 2008 that she regretted the failure of Superior but added that it received high ratings from regulators while she was chairwoman.
“Superior’s failure was complex,” she wrote on the Obama campaign’s Web site. “In short, the bank failed in 2001 because regulators concluded that the valuation of certain assets in Superior’s financial statements, which had been audited by Ernst & Young for many years and previously approved by regulators, was overstated and as a result the bank was not capitalized sufficiently. My family voluntarily agreed to pay the FDIC [$460 million] to help defray costs incurred by the government and other losses in connection with the bank’s closure.”
Labor groups also have criticized Ms. Pritzker and her family as being anti-union. She served until March on the Chicago Board of Education, where she clashed with the Chicago Teachers Union. One teachers’ union official told the Chicago Tribune that she had “a long and storied history as an anti-labor and anti-worker kind of boss.”
Hyatt Hotels is embroiled in a four-year-old labor dispute with its main union in Chicago over contract provisions. Union members even produced a movie about a company owned by the Pritzker family that shut down a manufacturing plant in Chicago and accepted millions in tax incentives to move jobs to Louisiana. The AFL-CIO has called for a global boycott of Hyatt.
Mr. Froman has served as the president’s deputy national security adviser for international economics. He has worked as the principal White House negotiator in completing trade agreements with Korea, Colombia and Panama and oversaw the creation of the Interagency Trade Enforcement Center to crack down on unfair trade practices.
His appointment comes as the Obama administration is putting new energy into a push for a Pacific Rim free-trade deal that excludes China but recently welcomed Japan into the fold.
Mr. Froman served in a variety of roles during the Clinton administration, including on the White House National Economic Council and as chief of staff of the Treasury Department. In the private sector, he served at Citigroup, primarily as an executive in its international business division.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.