Thomas James Vilsack is an American politician and lawyer. He served as the United States Secretary of Agriculture from January 2009 until January 2017. He was also the 40th Governor of Iowa from 1999 to 2007. On December 8, 2020, Axios reported that he will be nominated by President-elect Joe Biden to serve as Secretary of agriculture for a second time.
About Tom Vilsack in brief
Thomas James Vilsack is an American politician and lawyer. He served as the United States Secretary of Agriculture from January 2009 until January 2017. He was also the 40th Governor of Iowa from 1999 to 2007. On November 30, 2006, he formally launched his candidacy for nomination for President of the U.S. by the Democratic Party in the 2008 election, but ended his bid on February 23, 2007. In July 2016, he was on Hillary Clinton’s two-person shortlist to be her running mate for that year’s presidential election. On December 8, 2020, Axios reported that he will be nominated by President-elect Joe Biden to serve as Secretary of agriculture for a second time, under the incoming Biden administration. He is a member of the Iowa Democratic Party, and served in the Iowa Senate from 1992 to 1999. Vilsacks was born on December 13, 1950 in a Roman Catholic orphanage in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his 23-year-old birth mother had lived since September 1950 under the pseudonym of “Gloria” He married Christie Bell in 1973, and moved with her to her hometown of Mount Pleasant, Iowa in 1975, where he practiced law. He and his wife volunteered in the 1987 presidential campaign of Joe Biden. In a 2016 interview, he describes himself \”as the Jerry Lewis of Mountpleasant for a couple days\” when he hosted a pledge drive on the local radio station to raise the funds. He helped pass a law for workers to receive health coverage when changing jobs, and helped redesign Iowa’s Workforce Development Department. He also wrote a bill to have the State of Iowa assume a 50% share of local county mental health costs.
In 1998, Terry Branstad chose not to seek re-election after 16 years as governor. He defeated former Iowa Supreme Court Justice Mark McCormick in the Democratic primary and chose Sally Pederson as his running mate. In 2002 he won his second term in office by defeating Republican challenger Doug Gross by eight percentage points. In first year of second term, he used a line-item veto to create Grow Iowa Values Fund, a USD 503million appropriation designed to boost the economy by offering grants to corporations. He vetoed a bill that would have cut income taxes and eased business regulations. In September 2004, he complained that Iowa companies attracted to this program were attracted to companies that had previously made commitments to set aside USD 100million in state money to be set aside over the next ten years. They complained that the Iowa General Assembly had set aside the money in the end of the 2005 session under the current law, under which they would have to pay $50million per year per year. In 2008, he defeated Republican challenger Jim Ross Lightfoot, a former U. S. Representative, and became the first Democrat to serve in 30 years and only the fifth Democrat to hold the office in the 20th century. The Iowa Republican Party nominated Lightfoot to succeed Branstad, and he won the general election. In 2010, he narrowly won thegeneral election and was the first Democrats to run for governor again.
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