Billionaires Secrely Met In Aspen To Defeat Bush

In the days following the Democratic National Convention in Boston this past August, several billionaire Democratic activists secretly met at the famed Aspen Institute in Colorado.

The purpose of their clandestine meeting was "to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush," The New Yorker magazine reports in its most recent edition.

Details of the meeting remain sketchy, but the magazine described the Aspen conference this way: "Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the future of progressive politics in America."

For sure, there were differences of opinion in the group, but they all shared one goal: to get George Bush this November.

The Aspen meeting was supposed to have been a top secret within Democratic Party circles.

When The New Yorker inquired about the meeting, an assistant to one of the attendees was surprised by the call.

"No one was supposed to know about this," the aide told the magazine. "We don't want people thinking it's a cabal or some sort of Masonic plot!"

Apparently the leader of the secret cabal is billionaire Peter B. Lewis, chairman of the Cleveland, Ohio-based insurance company Progressive Corporation.

Like another attendee, wealthy financier George Soros, Lewis has poured millions into Democratic 527 groups, including Americans Coming Together and MoveOn.org.

One of Lewis' top agenda items has been the decriminalization of marijuana, a policy position also shared by Soros.

Another billionaire who attended was John Sperling, founder of the online University of Phoenix.

Also present were Herb and Marion Sandler from California. The couple founded Golden West Financial Corporation, a California bank reportedly worth $17 billion.

The key agenda items for the Sandlers has been "preserving progressive income taxes and inheritance taxes," the magazine reported.

The wealthiest and most notable of those attending the meeting was George Soros, the 74-year-old Hungarian immigrant who desperately wants to defeat George Bush and has even compared him to the likes of Adolf Hitler.

Apparently, all was not roses at the billionaire confab, according to The New Yorker.

"The billionaires spent much of the time moaning the superior powers of the GOP," the magazine said, and the group even needed some cheerleading from Harold Ickes, a former top aide to Bill Clinton who is involved in the 527 efforts.

There was disagreement about some of the issues and policy positions the group should take.

Sperling, for one, argued that the main target of their efforts should be Wal-Mart. He wants to push for unionizing the giant retailer.

That idea was apparently vetoed by George Soros, who reportedly told the group he had no desire to support union initiatives and that his only single goal at this point was "ousting Bush."

Though not the leader of the group, Soros holds the largest bank account and as such is the 800-pound gorilla, having given more than $18 million to the 527s in an effort to defeat Bush.

The magazine said Soros had planned to keep a low profile in the closing months of the election, but suddenly changed course this summer when he decided to "jettison the strategy in favor of waging his own media-grabbing political campaign."

Soros hired a publicist and began a 12-city, $3 million personal crusade to defeat George Bush.

According to the magazine, Soros has nothing but contempt for Bush, who he considers "an ignorant fool."

More than that, he sees Bush as the face man for a secret cabal. "Bush was just chosen as a figurehead, an acceptable face for a sinister group," Soros told The New Yorker, adding, "Cheney is the Capo."

The New Yorker

THE MONEY MAN

by JANE MAYER

Can George Soros’s millions insure the defeat of President Bush?

On August 6th, a week after the Democratic Convention, a clandestine summit meeting took place at the Aspen Institute, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The participants, all Democrats, were sworn to secrecy, and few of them will discuss the event. One thing that is certain, however, is that the guests formed a tableau that not many people would associate with the Democratic Party of the past. Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the future of progressive politics in America. The billionaires were not especially close socially, nor were they in complete agreement about politics or strategy. Yet they shared a common goal: to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush in the 2004 election.

“No one was supposed to know about this,” an assistant to one participant told me, declining to be named. “We don’t want people thinking it’s a cabal, or some sort of Masonic plot!” His concern was understandable: the prospect of rich men concentrating their wealth in order to sway an American election was an inflammatory one, particularly given the Democratic Party’s populist rhetoric. This private meeting of plutocrats was an unintended consequence of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform law of 2002. Previously, wealthy donors had contributed “soft money” to the political parties, which controlled how the funds were spent. The reform legislation had banned such gifts, forcing donors to find new ways of influencing the political process.

The meeting’s organizer was Peter B. Lewis, the seventy-year-old reclusive chairman of the Progressive Corporation, an insurance company based in Cleveland, Ohio. He has spent much of 2004 discreetly directing millions of dollars to liberal groups allied with the Democratic Party, such as America Coming Together and MoveOn.org, while cruising the Mediterranean Sea on his two-hundred-and-fifty-foot yacht, Lone Ranger. The yacht has communications equipment that allows Lewis to monitor political developments in America while sunbathing off the coast of Italy. Lewis, a major backer of efforts to decriminalize marijuana, has helped underwrite campaigns to hold referenda on decriminalization in Arizona and California. (In 2000, he was arrested in New Zealand for possessing marijuana.) According to Lewis’s friends, he concluded that it would be best to remain a shadow figure in the 2004 campaign; he has declined all requests for interviews.

Flying in from Arizona was John Sperling, an octogenarian businessman who in 1976 created the for-profit University of Phoenix. Sperling is also the co-author of a recent book, “The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America,” which suggests that the 2004 election is a contest between “‘God, Family, and Flag’ folks”—who live in the South, the Great Plains, the Rockies, and Appalachia—and forward-thinking metropolitans who support “economic modernity,” “religious moderation,” and “excellence in education and science.”

Herb and Marion Sandler, a California couple in their seventies, came to Aspen looking for ways to give back to a country that had allowed them to prosper. The founders of Golden West Financial Corporation, a savings-and-loan company worth seventeen billion dollars, the Sandlers are devoted to the idea of preserving progressive income taxes and inheritance taxes.

SNIP

In May, 2003, Bush had what seemed like intimidatingly high popularity ratings, and there was overwhelming public support for the war. But Soros had one of his anticipatory hunches that the President’s support was a bubble that could burst. Moreover, he had the ego and the audacity to think that he could pop it. He commissioned two political researchers, Mark Steitz and Tom Novick, to determine whether it would be possible for Soros himself to exert political impact.

The following July, Soros invited a group of top Democratic activists to join him in the salmon-colored drawing room at El Mirador, his weekend estate in Southampton, Long Island, for the presentation of the consultants’ report. Steitz and Novick indicated that the 2004 election would probably be very close. The electorate was polarized, with only ten per cent of likely voters undecided. The best strategy, they said, would be to mobilize the Democratic base and persuade undecided voters with a state-of-the-art field operation. The plan was projected to cost at least seventy-five million dollars. As the researchers gave their presentation, Steitz recalled, “Soros was very engrossed. He leaned forward when we were talking about getting out the vote, and asked, ‘You mean you actually go door to door?’ All the practical aspects caught his imagination.”

Under the new campaign-finance law, supporters could no longer give unlimited funds directly to the Democratic Party—but according to the consultants’ interpretation of the law they could funnel private contributions into allied “independent” groups. As the discussion proceeded, it was proposed that Soros provide enough funds to these groups to pay for field operations in six or seven of the seventeen states that were expected to be the most contested. Soros, Steitz recalled, insisted that funds be offered for all seventeen. “He said, ‘I don’t want to build half a bridge! I want to do what’s necessary to effect the outcome!’”

When I asked Soros why he hadn’t just written a check for the whole seventy-five million, he said, “I thought ten would do.” Peter Lewis had agreed to match each donation—and, Soros hoped, their example would get others to join in. “They were doing what rich old guys should do when they think things have gone awry,” Peter Lewis’s son, Jonathan, told me. “They’re like a married couple,” he said of the two men. “If they have differences of opinion, they work it out.”

David Magleby, a dean at Brigham Young University, who studies politics and money, said that Soros’s decision had a catalytic effect. “He made himself highly visible in a way that was surprising,” Magleby said. “He became a lightning rod. It was a conscious decision to energize the Democrats. And Soros was right. Soros launched a counterattack that surprised the Republicans, and probably even the Democrats. The money was particularly important because it was so early. It’s investment banking applied to politics.”

In concert with Peter Lewis, Soros made large donations to ostensibly independent groups such as America Coming Together and the Young Voter Alliance. By this October, Soros had become one of the largest political-campaign contributors in American history, having spent an estimated eighteen and a half million dollars to defeat Bush.

Critics of Soros see his donations as brazenly hypocritical, considering that, until recently, he was a leading crusader for campaign-finance reform in America. Starting in the late nineteen-nineties, he donated eighteen million dollars to groups that supported the cause, and he is credited with having contributed significantly to the passage of the McCain-Feingold law. When Soros was asked about this reversal, he said, “This is the most important election of my lifetime. These aren’t normal times. The ends justify every legal means possible.”

SNIP

In early October, Soros told me, “I feel that Kerry hasn’t gone far enough about Iraq.” What had the candidate failed to say? “We need to convince the people of Iraq that we’re going to leave,” Soros said. Hadn’t Kerry said precisely that, during his first debate with Bush? “Yes, well, he did, but we have to make clear under what conditions we’ll leave, and what we’ll leave behind. We have to put in place systems for allocating the oil revenues.”

SNIP

“The professionals have told me not to get mad but to get even,” he said. Some fellow-activists on the Democratic side, such as Wes Boyd, the founder of MoveOn.org, had cautioned him about becoming a distraction in the campaign. Privately, some Democratic officials were more scathing. One worried that the Party’s top funder was getting “kooky,” and said, “He should shut up!” Another suggested acidly, “Why doesn’t he just run for President himself?”

SNIP

Bush “poses a massive threat” to everything that Soros values.

SNIP

One of Soros’s former associates, whose political views are more conservative, and who asked not to be identified, suggested that the financier, encouraged by like-minded liberals in New York, was mired in the same kind of fallacious group thinking that he had seized upon during his hedge-fund days. “He’s lost his bearings,” she argued. “How can he credibly compare America to a police state?”

At El Mirador on a sparkling day in late summer, Soros spoke darkly about the future. “I find it really difficult to conceive of a Bush victory,” he said. “It would be so detrimental to the world, to the U.S., and to me personally.”

SNIP

Soros’s social set also includes the rock star Bono and the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan.

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