"dyspeptic" demeanor. In November 2009, Ickes joined New York Governor David Paterson's election campaign as a senior adviser. Clinton Administration Ickes chaired Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in New York in 1992, persuading state Democrats to stand by Clinton despite the controversy over Gennifer Flowers. In the Clinton administration, Ickes served as Deputy Chief of Staff under Leon Panetta. In a lengthy New York Times profile of Ickes in 1997, Michael Lewis nicknamed Ickes "the Garbage Man" and noted that 'Ickes has been caught up in so many of Clinton's scandals and crises that he came to describe his function in the White House as 'director of the sanitation department'.' When Erskine Bowles was appointed Chief of Staff after Clinton's 1996 re-election, he requested to have input in choosing his subordinates, and so Ickes was dismissed from his position. It has also been suggested that Ickes resigned to take the fall for President Clinton, as Republican Senator Fred Thompson had the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee probe Clinton's campaign finances. In 2000, he was a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign. He now heads the Media Fund, a 527 committee. Following the 2004 elections, he was a contender against Howard Dean for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Ickes worked as a political strategist for Hillary Clinton's failed campaign in the 2008 presidential election. Ickes reportedly had a poor relationship with campaign strategist Mark Penn. This acrimony carried over from their days in President Bill Clinton's administration. DNC rules and bylaws committee As a member of the DNC's Rules Committee he was a proponent of adding other states besides Iowa and New Hampshire early on in the Presidential nominating calendar. He was unsuccessful in his promotion of Alabama as the second primary state, after New Hampshire, which lost to South Carolina. With all but one member of the Rules and Bylaws Commission, Ickes voted in August 2007 to strip Florida and Michigan of their delegates. Clinton won the vote in Florida after neither candidate campaigned there and voters were told that their vote would not count, in accordance with the earlier decision. At a contentious meeting of the DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee held at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC, on May 31, 2008, Ickes voted in favor of a compromise resolution to allow the Florida delegation to be seated with each delegate having one half