The pro-Obama organization pushing for the president’s second-term goals by using the existing infrastructure of the Obama 2012 campaign counts as one of its major donors a San Francisco socialite with an eccentric, fedora-wearing writer husband, according to OFA’s recent disclosure of its founding donors.
San Francisco heiress Nicola Miner, daughter of the late Oracle Corporation co-founder Bob Miner, contributed $125,000 to Organizing for Action, the nonprofit group founded by former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina to advocate for the president’s second-term policies. Miner’s donation was more than twice the amount required to earn access to OFA’s March founder’s summit, where Obama was in attendance.
Miner and her husband, occasional fiction writer Robert Mailer Anderson, have been actively involved with the SFJazzCenter, which has an auditorium named after Bob Miner and which launched in January after a $63 million capital campaign co-chaired by Anderson. Sponsors and donors include Google, the San Francisco Chronicle and Northern Trust.
Anderson is well-known in elite social circles for the “neo-noir” inflection of his attire, including a trademark fedora hat. Anderson even managed to pose for a photograph with Obama in matching fedoras at the March 2012 Obama campaign fundraiser that Miner and Anderson hosted at their Pacific Heights, San Francisco home.
“I’m more of a cross between Cary Grant and Jerry Lee Lewis,” Anderson told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview last year.
“He may look like a safe white boy, but watch out. Cutting-edge art,” Anderson told an interviewer last year in reference to his bringing a straight-edge razor to a photo shoot. “I like the idea of looking good but making people slightly uncomfortable.”
Anderson’s 2001 novel Boonville burnished Anderson’s literary reputation, with one reviewer calling him the “WASP Lenny Bruce,” but since its publication and his marriage to Miner Anderson has only had one notable writing credit, a low-budget 2008 horror film entitled Pighunt. He has otherwise taken on unproduced screenplay projects and immersed himself in philanthropic endeavors.
“Surrounded by misfits, rednecks, and counterculture burnouts, John Gibson—the reluctant heir of an alcoholic grandmother—and Sarah McKay—a commune-reared ‘hippie-by-association’—search for self and community in the hole-of-a-town Boonville. As they try to assemble from the late-twentieth-century jumble of life the facts of sexuality, love, and death, and face the possibility of an existence without God, John and Sarah learn what happens when they dare to try to make art from their lives,” according to a description of Boonville on Amazon.
Anderson reportedly encouraged the budding career of Youtube rapper Azealia Banks, who was later picked up by the William Morris Agency, based on his admiration for her song “212.”
“Kick it with your bitch who come from Parisian/She know where I get mine from, and the season/Now she wanna lick my plum in the evening/And fit that ton-tongue d-deep in,” Banks raps in the song, referring to an act of female-on-female cunnilingus.
“I guess that cunt getting eaten, I guess that cunt getting eaten,” Banks’ rap continues.
“You’re gay to get discovered in my two-one-deuce/Cock-a-licking in the water by the blue bayou,” Banks adds.
Obama’s relationship with the fine-arts community has been fraught with previous troubles. The Obama administration garnered scrutiny in 2009 after the National Endowment for the Arts reportedly distributed grant money to arts groups that supported Obamacare.