MPAA’s Kate Bedingfield Tapped To Be Joe Biden’s Communications Director
This should rev up the speculation that Joe Biden plans a presidential run, with an entree to Hollywood. The MPAA’s chief spokesperson, Kate Bedingfield, just moved to the Veep’s office to serve as his Communications Director. She succeeds Shailagh Murray, who’s now a Senior Advisor to President Obama.
Bedingfield “will be a key advisor to me, a terrific asset to our office, and an important member of the entire White House organization,” Biden says.
Bedingfield already had a long resume handling political communications when MPAA chief Chris Dodd hired her in 2011, ahead of her promotion to VP Communications in May 2013. She moved to the trade group from White House where she was Deputy Director of Media Affairs and Director of Response. She handled campaign communications in 2008 for presidential candidate John Edwards and, when his campaign collapsed, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) in her election effort.
At MPAA, Bedingfield was “a trusted advisor and a strategic thinker that I turned to for guidance on communicating the number of complex issues our studios face every day in the U.S. and around the world,” Dodd says.
The announcement is intriguing for those trying to read the tea leaves about Biden’s plans for 2016. Dodd and Biden are longtime pals from their years together in the Senate. And it’s hard to imagine that Bedingfield, an energetic and well-liked presence at the MPAA, would jump to a short-term gig representing a lame duck.
Biden fueled talk about a possible effort to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination over the weekend when he met with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
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