Donor Scorecard: Alan Solomont

By Ken Silverstein

Barack Obama’s campaign reported yesterday that in the year’s first quarter it had netted nearly $25 million for his 2008 White House bid, putting him in a rough tie for first place with Hillary Clinton in the race to buy the presidency. Alan Solomont, described in a recent Washington Post story as the “Boston philanthropist” overseeing Obama’s fundraising in the Northeast, has said his candidate's remarkable performance was due to an “almost spontaneous outpouring” from donors. Obama has attracted a relatively large number of small donors, but no politician raises $25 million “spontaneously.” Bringing home that sort of cash requires help from a network of insiders--like Solomont, who has been raising money for Democratic presidential candidates for nearly two decades.

It’s technically accurate to describe Solomont as a philanthropist, but one could say the same thing of Bill Gates. In the context of political fundraising, the more relevant fact is that Gates is the co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft; as for Solomont, he grew rich as a nursing home magnate and continues to have broad interests in the heath care sector.

As a young man, Solomont was a die-hard liberal, who attended the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago as a page; a few years afterwards he was fired from a nursing home job for trying to unionize the work force. But after graduating with a nursing degree, Solomont shifted gears and helped his father manage several family-owned nursing homes, according to a story in the Boston Globe. Later still, he became the CEO of a company called ADS Group, the biggest nursing home chain in the northeast, which is where he made the money that allowed him to become such a generous philanthropist.

Solomont currently is the CEO of Solomont Bailis Ventures, a Massachusetts-based nursing home group with interests in the United States and Latin America. “He also serves as a Director of the Boston Private Bank & Trust Company and as a Managing Member of Angel Healthcare Investors, LLC,” according to a biography posted on the web.

Solomont began raising money for Democratic candidates back in the 1970s, and played a major role Michael Dukakis's 1982 Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign and his presidential run six years later. He also raised big money for Bill Clinton, and some $40 million for the Democrats after the president named him the party's finance chairman in 1997. He was a leading fundraiser for presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry as well, once bringing in $4 million for the latter at a single event.

Solomont has always portrayed his fundraising activities as being entirely separate from his political interests. "People often ask me: 'What do you get out of this?” he said to the Globe of his campaign work. “I say: 'I get a better America’."

He also gets a better place at the table. One of the reasons the nursing home industry is hugely profitable is because its leaders, Solomont included, have fought off attempts at regulation and reform. When Solomont was raising money for Governor Dukakis, he was also helping craft the Dukakis policy on long-term care for the elderly. Solomont not only brought in huge amounts of money for Clinton’s 1996 re-election run--including more than $1 million from nursing home owners--but contributed $160,000 of his own cash to the Democratic Party. In the midst of the campaign, Time magazine reported, he visited Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala “with a team of lobbyists to press for less stringent enforcement of nursing-home regulations. Solomont . . . kept on lobbying throughout the campaign to win major concessions for his industry over the objections of consumer advocates. He got much of what he wanted.” Apparently a better America means a much richer Solomont.