Obama's Sugar Mama

" Penny Pritzker was Barack Obama’s first billionaire. Their relationship goes back to the early 1990s. Before Obama ever ran for public office, he and Pritzker served together on the board of the Annenberg Challenge, a foundation that distributed $150 million to the public schools.

For Pritzker, heiress to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, serving on the board was a civic duty that came with wealth. For Obama, who had recently returned to Chicago from Harvard Law School, the Annenberg Challenge was his coming out as a member of the city’s elite. He was elected its chairman, and used it as a resume line when he ran for state senate in 1996. (The Annenberg Challenge’s greatest legacy was as a networking opportunity for the future president. A University of Illinois at Chicago study found it had “little impact on student incomes.”)

When Obama was thinking of running for the Senate, he knew he had to raise millions of dollars. So he asked his best friend, Marty Nesbitt, the vice president of Pritzker Realty Group, to arrange a meeting with his boss. One weekend in 2002, Obama and his wife, Michelle, drove out to Pritzker’s Michigan vacation home. Obama impressed Pritzker as “a guy with an amazing intellectual capacity,” and she decided to get behind his campaign. Her support attracted several more liberal millionaires, including Newton Minow and James Crown. On Primary Night 2004, Obama held his victory party at the Hyatt. "

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