Andy J. Spahn (born July 27, 1953) is an American political activist, consultant and Democratic Party fundraiser. He is the political advisor to DreamWorks founders Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
From his beginnings as a radical anti-war and anti-apartheid activist in California, Spahn advanced in the 1980s to direct Tom Hayden's Campaign for Economic Democracy. In the 1990s, Spahn was the president of Norman Lear's Environmental Media Association, the David Geffen Foundation, and a corporate executive at DreamWorks. Spahn founded his own strategic consulting firm in 2006 and was active in the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities during the Obama Administration. In 2017, he was called "Hollywood’s leading fundraising consultant to the powerful".
Activism
Spahn's first political activism was against the U.S. war in Vietnam at the age of 18. He was a draft resister, refusing to register his name for Selective Service, and he spoke to motivate others to resist. He dropped out of college for a year or two, which was an experience he said he would not have traded, but for which he paid a price professionally. As a college junior at UC Berkeley in mid-1977, Spahn joined the newly formed activist group Campuses United Against Apartheid (CUAA). He traveled California telling university students how corporations divesting from South Africa could be used as a weapon against state-sanctioned apartheid. Spahn wrote an article, "Reinvestment", describing the extent that the University of California was investing in South Africa through its stocks, bonds and investments portfolio which put $792 million into multi-national corporations that did business in South Africa. Spahn proposed the UC system reallocate its investments to small businesses in California. Spahn also spoke against institutional racism and for affirmative action, referencing the ongoing Bakke case. In 1978–79, Spahn founded the Berkeley-based Students for Economic and Racial Justice (SERJ), an anti-apartheid group collaborating with CUAA, and he was a vice president of the Associated Students of the University of California. Spahn graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1976, Spahn went to work for Tom Hayden's unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate in California. Following this, he worked with Hayden and Hayden's wife, Jane Fonda, in the mid-to-late 1970s as political director of their activist group, Campaign for Economic Democracy. In 1983, Spahn assisted the Democratic Party primary campaign of Senator Alan Cranston for president, which petered out in early 1984. Picking up from there, Spahn created the Democratic Entertainment Industry Project to coordinate fundraising efforts in Hollywood aimed to fight against Ronald Reagan's reelection run in that year's presidential election. The DEIP, which was funded by the three major national democratic committees, and was part of the Hayden–Fonda circle of influence, employed Spahn to shepherd Hollywood talent around the country in support of Walter Mondale's campaign for president, and other democratic House and Senate candidates. This effort helped to birth in August 1984 the Hollywood Women's Political Committee.
Working in Washington D.C. for a few years, Spahn served on campaign committees for Senator George Mitchell and Tony Coelho, where he worked alongside Rahm Emanuel. He was the national finance director for presidential candidate Gary Hart in 1987, but Hart dropped out when reports revealed his marital infidelity. Spahn said that Hart's fall was a tragedy for the 1988 election: "Hart came from progressive politics... he was going to be the first of our generation to be elected president. We believed he was better prepared to govern" than other candidates in the race.
In April 1989, Spahn helped build Norman Lear's Environmental Media Association, to promote environmental issues by integrating them into the storylines of television programs. Spahn served as president. Spahn said the EMA "hopes to generate a climate of concern about our environment and give creative expression to the vision of a healthy future for the planet." Environmental issues were worked into television episode plots centrally or peripherally. The change could be as little as characters carpooling or recycling, or whole episode themes might be devoted to the topic, such as Thirtysomething main character Hope becoming an activist against pollution.