Leo Hindery: A Liberal Canary in the Obama Mine Shaft Who Deserves Watching

Never heard of Leo Hindery? Here’s his profile:

Leo Hindery, Jr., is Managing Partner of InterMedia Partners VII, LP, a New York-based media industry private equity fund which he founded in 2005 and which is a successor to six previous InterMedia investment funds that he formed beginning in 1988. The investments of those earlier funds were sold in 1998-1999.

Until October 2004, Mr. Hindery was Chairman (and until May 2004 Chief Executive Officer) of The YES Network, the nation’s largest regional sports network which he founded in the summer of 2001 as the television home of the New York Yankees, where he won five executive producer Emmys for outstanding programming. From December 1999 until January 2001, Mr. Hindery was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of GlobalCenter Inc., a major Internet services company, which was then merged into Exodus Communications, Inc. Until November 1999, Mr. Hindery was President and Chief Executive Officer of AT&T Broadband, which was formed out of the March 1999 merger of Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) into AT&T. (AT&T Broadband encompassed all of AT&T’s video, local telephone and Internet services operations.) Mr. Hindery was elected President of TCI and all of its affiliated companies, then the world’s largest cable television system operator and programming entity, in February 1997.

Mr. Hindery is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and from 2003 through December 2007 was Senate-appointed Vice Chair of the HELP Commission formed by an Act of Congress to improve U.S. foreign assistance. From December 2006 until February 2008, he served as Senior Economic Policy Advisor for presidential candidate John Edwards.

Okay, so Leo got snookered by John Edwards. And, there’s been some criticism of some of his business activities. That doesn’t discount his importance within the Democrat Party — or what he’s saying now.

After Edwards, Leo became a big-time supporter of Obama. In March 2008 he wrote,

I was privileged to be presidential candidate John Edwards’ Senior Economic Policy Advisor, but today I am just as honored to endorse Senator Barack Obama. And I do so for precisely the same reasons I long and enthusiastically supported and helped John Edwards.

At Senator’s Obama’s very core, and at the core of his Campaign and its economic policies, are his abiding commitments to working men and women and to economic fairness. And the critically important policy issues associated with his core values, and how he proposes to specifically address them, are what are now defining the national election.

Like John Edwards, Barack Obama seeks effective public policy aimed at sustained growth, full employment, an end to poverty, and progress toward solving the major social and environmental problems associated with health care, education, trade, taxation and climate change… Barack Obama will be a president of the ages and for all ages.

Leo backs Democrat causes with his wallet. Federal Election Commission records list his donations of $1,474,152 in “soft money” since 2000, and $356,000 to individual Democrat candidates.

Now, in February 2010, a year after the inauguration of a “president of the ages and for all ages,” Leo’s chirping a different tune than he did two years ago:

Specifically, what the country needs to see right now are hard results from taking — but this time taking effectively — the sensible, pragmatic steps to help middle class Americans that Candidate Obama proposed during the 2008 Campaign. And the reason I say “but this time taking effectively” is because I believe that the President’s administration made six major mistakes over the last year in executing his domestic economic recovery plan, mistakes that probably should have been acknowledged in the Speech and at least still need to be addressed.

Mistake number 1 was compromising right out of the box on the new administration’s promised commitment to “new populism…Mistake number 2 was immediately thereafter putting health care reform so obviously ahead of CREATING JOBS, even though Candidate Obama had said that jobs and employment would never take a back seat to any other initiative…In addition to the misplaced priority versus creating jobs, the voters of Massachusetts also took strong exception to the unfair manner in which the Senate was proposing to pay for the changes to our health care system – this was mistake number 3…Mistake number 4 was the high priority that was at once given to Wall Street’s massive bailout…Mistake number 5 was not addressing head-on the trading abuses of our major trading partners, especially China…Mistake number 6 was allowing some in the administration to officially declare the recession over when the nation again had positive GDP growth, no matter how meager that growth was and how it was really gained.

Leo’s a long way from admitting that his support of candidate Obama was a seventh mistake, but he did appear on the network deemed evil by Progressives. In the following interview with FOX‘s Neil Cavuto, Leo offers a clear and compelling criticism of the healthcare reform saga.

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In the Cavuto interview, Leo refers to a “really sick economy.” He makes clear just how sick he thinks the economy is in this clip from June 2009.

When listening to him talk, it’s easy to forget that Leo Hindery is an influential, well-heeled, liberal Democrat. His negative review of the Obama administration’s handling of the economy should register in the White House.

Meanwhile, Leo is a Democrat canary in the Obama mine shaft worth watching.