Veteran biotech analyst and fund manager Lissa Morgenthaler-Jones has a plan to start a life sciences, environmental and energy fund, but it’s on hold. She’s too busy campaigning to amend the Constitution so that a foreign-born U.S. citizen -- for instance, Austrian native Arnold Schwarzenegger -- can be elected president.
“When I first met Arnold at a fundraiser two years ago, I assumed he’d be a muscle-bound meathead,” says Morgenthaler-Jones, 47. “But after five minutes I was certain this guy could go all the way to the White House.” She has since donated more than $100,000 to the California governor’s campaign and other causes he has supported, such as a 2002 ballot proposition that boosted state funding of before- and after-school programs. She also advised Schwarzenegger on the
$3 billion stem-cell research proposition that he supported and the state’s voters passed in November; now she’s spearheading the Amend for Arnold drive, which kicked into high gear after election day with a series of ads on California cable television stations and the Internet.
The daughter of David Morgenthaler, who started Silicon Valley private equity shop Morgenthaler Ventures in 1968, Morgenthaler-Jones supported Democrat John Kerry for president but likes Republican Schwarzenegger’s blend of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. She knows her odds of playing presidential kingmaker are long: It takes a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by 38 states to approve a constitutional amendment. “One of the joys is that it’s really going to be a movement of, by and for the people,” says Morgenthaler-Jones, who managed the $25 million Monterey Murphy New World Biotechnology Fund from 1998 to 2001 and since then has been preoccupied with fundraising for political and civic causes. “If nothing else, many people will read a part of the Constitution.”
