Melissa Bean

Melissa Bean

Melissa Luburić Bean (born January 22, 1962 in Chicago , Illinois ) is an American politician . She represented the state of Illinois in the US House of Representatives from 2005 to 2011 . The Democrat had been in office since she surprisingly beat long-time Republican MP Phil Crane in the 2004 election.

Family and career

Melissa Bean is the child of Serbian immigrants. She is an avowed Orthodox Christian . She lives in Barrington with her husband and two children . Bean graduated from Roosevelt University in Chicago; she owns a consulting firm whose clients include several Fortune 1000 companies.

politics

Bean represented the 8th Congressional constituency in the state of Illinois. The district is located in the suburbs of Chicago and is considered the republican heartland of the state. Until it was elected, the district had always voted republican since its formation in 1935.

Bean first ran for the mandate in 2002 . She accused the incumbent Phil Crane, who has been in parliament since 1969, of having lost touch with the grassroots and the real world. The former leader of the dogmatic conservatives would now serve his parliamentary term without much activity. In particular, she accused him of various trips that various lobby groups had paid for. In the election she reached a surprising 43 percent; in doing so, she received little support from her party, which had written off the district as unusable. For the 2002 election, the constituency boundaries had been redrawn, according to Bean, in a way that worked in Crane's favor, as more democratic areas were no longer part of the 8th Congressional District after the redraw.

In the 2004 elections she managed to raise almost as much money for the campaign as Crane. Most of the money came from individual donors, while Crane relied on the Political Action Committee . The Democratic Party gave her strong support after her respectable success in 2002, as she hoped to land a surprise victory this time. Among other things, the Senate candidate Barack Obama provided money and helpers, as his own election prospects were already brilliant at this point. In the elections on November 2, 2004, she was able to win with 52 percent of the vote.

In the 2006 election, Illinois Republicans wanted to focus their efforts on Bean's district. As the results of the presidential elections showed, the 8th district is still the republican stronghold in the state. As a newcomer to Parliament, Bean had not yet acquired the resources, contacts, and notoriety to secure her position. With 51 percent of the vote she was able to defend her seat against David McSweeney. In 2008 she competed against Steve Greenberg and achieved an even clearer victory with 60 percent. However, the 2010 elections turned around in favor of the Republicans; Melissa Bean also had to cede her mandate to Joe Walsh and resign on January 3, 2011 from the House of Representatives.

Political opinions

Bean belongs to the more right wing of her party, in the House of Representatives she voted several times with the Republicans against the Democratic majority. Their approval of CAFTA was particularly controversial . Various US unions have announced that they will no longer support them as a result of this vote; But the unions had been an important force that won them the 2004 election.

She is a member of the intra-party coalition of the Blue Dog Democrats and sat on Parliament's finance committee during her time in the House of Representatives .

Web links

Commons : Melissa Bean  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Melissa Bean in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• Melissa Bean in the nndb (English)
• Campaign donation documentation