Ben Barnes (Texas politician)
Ben Barnes (born April 17, 1938) is an American lobbyist and former Lieutenant Governor of Texas. He was a vice-chair [1] and top fund-raiser of the John Kerry campaign, being one of only 8 people who have raised over $500,000 for Kerry [2].
Barnes served as state Speaker of the House in Texas from 1965-1969, U.S. representative to the NATO Conference in 1967, and United Nations Representative to Geneva, Switzerland, in 1968.
Barnes served as Lieutenant Governor from 1969 until 1973. In 1971, he was caught up in the political fallout of the Sharpstown scandal, which helped Ben Barnes evenually step down.
By the late 1990s Barnes had become a millionaire lobbyist working for GTech, a company that operated lotteries in 37 states including Texas. The Texas lottery was losing money, in part because of a lucrative deal in which Barnes received 3.5 cents for every ticket sold – more than $3 million per year. For many years Ben Barnes and the lobbying firm he founded in Austin, EntreCorp, have made many millions of dollars by acting as the go-between bringing special interest groups and companies together with highly-placed Democrat officeholders. The Center for Responsive Politics has listed Barnes as the third largest all-around Democratic donor in America 1999-2004. So influential and important is Barnes to the Democratic Party, as this column reported last January, that Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle has nicknamed this money man and lobbyist “the fifty-first Democratic Senator.”
Since leaving elective office, Barnes has become a successful business executive and civic leader. He is the founder of Entrecorp, a business consulting and lobbying firm. He has served as a consultant, director or chairman of more than two dozen companies, including SBC, American Airlines, Dallas Bank and Trust, Grumman Systems Support Corporation, Laredo National Bank and the Barnes/Connally Partnership.
In 1999, Barnes claimed that while Speaker of the House he had "personally interceded" with Texas Air National Guard officials to get George W. Bush into the Guard [3]. Barnes repeated the claim in the U.S. presidential election, 2004, specifically stating that he had assisted Bush while Lieutenant Governor. The charge met heavy criticism over its inconsistency (Barnes did not become Lieutenant Governor until 1969 - after Bush joined the guard) and after his daughter Amy publicly challenged the veracity of his story.