Posted on 04/06/2005 5:46:33 AM PDT by Quilla
EDITOR'S NOTE: NR White House Correspondent Byron York's new book, The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, details how MoveOn.org, George Soros, Michael Moore, 527 groups, Al Franken, and other Democratic activists built the biggest, richest, and best organized political movement in generations. The book reports that in 2003, as Democratic operatives were planning the campaign against President Bush, they obtained a copy of a top-secret Republican strategy plan authored by top White House political adviser Karl Rove. The following excerpt details how those operatives, as part of the effort to woo Soros and other multi-million dollar contributors, showed Soros the secret Rove plan during a crucial planning session at Soros's Hamptons estate. After the meeting, Soros became the biggest campaign donor in American history, giving more than $25 million to the effort to defeat George W. Bush.
In June 2003, Soros announced he was pulling back from the pro-democracy work that his main foundation, the Open Society Institute, did in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union so that he could focus his attention on the United States. The change was necessary, Soros told reporters in Moscow, because the political scene in America had become "quite dangerous." In the Bush administration, Soros explained, "the executive branch has come under the influence of a group of ideologues who have forgotten the first principle of an open society: that they don't have a monopoly on truth."
"What really got him energized was the foreign policy of this administration," Soros's chief of staff and political advisor, Michael Vachon, told me. "He was motivated by his conviction that the Bush administration's foreign policy was leading the U.S. in a disastrous direction." So Soros decided that Bush had to go.Of course, Soros, a Hungarian-born naturalized U.S. citizen, had just one vote. But he had a lot of money. Still, even a man of Soros's wealth and reach didn't know quite how one went about toppling a president. So he called in the experts, or,more accurately, he had his expert — Vachon — call in the experts. Vachon told me he got in touch with two Democratic political consulting firms, TSD Communications, based in Washington, D.C., and M&R Strategic Services, with major offices in D.C. and in Portland, Oregon, and asked them to come up with suggestions for a Soros-funded anti-Bush campaign.
I asked Mark Steitz, the "S" in TSD Communications, what Soros wanted. "He said, 'I am concerned about the direction our country is going under this guy [Bush],'" Steitz, a former communications director for the Democratic National Committee and top advisor to Jesse Jackson, told me. "'I want to know what are the strategies that could be used to change this. Are there investments that could be made that could make a difference? How would you do this?' He approached it in a way that, I might imagine, he approaches investments."
Steitz and his colleagues, along with a separate team from M&R, studied the issue. Should Soros pour a lot of cash into anti-Bush television advertising? Should he pour it into Democratic efforts to win back Congress? Would the new McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, which Soros had vigorously supported, be a significant handicap in the effort?
Both groups of consultants came to the same conclusion. Rejecting an old-style, big-money TV campaign, Steitz and his colleagues argued that Soros could have the most impact by concentrating his donations in what is called the "voter contact" area. Much more than the old idea of getting out the vote, "voter contact" means an intensive effort to identify and profile potential voters in every voting district in critical swing states, getting in touch with them long before the election, and then keeping up with them, nurturing them, and making sure they get to the polls on Election Day. In July 2003, the consultants' team combined their research to make a presentation to Soros at his home in Southampton, the same Long Island estate where, a few months later, the billionaire would receive a fund-raising appeal from MoveOn's Wes Boyd.
Steitz was a true believer in the new approach, which was a radical departure from older mass-audience appeals of television ads and direct mail. As I talked with Steitz about how he and the consultant team had prepared the presentation for Soros, I learned that the plan had been heavily influenced by two factors. One — no surprise — was the success that Democratic-supporting labor unions had had in their get-out-the vote efforts. But the other, perhaps more powerful, influence on Steitz's thinking — big surprise — was a secret, cutting-edge political strategy document prepared by Karl Rove, the president's top political advisor. The document, a PowerPoint presentation that outlined GOP strategy in the 2002 midterm elections and laid the groundwork for a similar strategy in 2004, had been made "unintentionally available" to Democrats in the first months of 2003, Steitz told me. It was not clear just how that happened — was it stolen? lost? leaked? — but once the document fell into Democratic hands, it was shared, e-mail to e-mail, among a number of top party strategists in Washington.
One of them was Steitz, who read it eagerly and was deeply impressed. "A big influence on all this [the Soros plan] was the Rove PowerPoint presentation," Steitz told me. "It's a remarkable document." Armed with that knowledge, the strategists made their presentation, and during that presentation, they actually showed Soros portions of the Republicans' secret plan. "The purpose [of presenting the GOP document] was to show the importance of voter contact,"Vachon told me. Soros might as well have been briefed by Karl Rove himself.
When Steitz told me the story, I immediately thought of a minor sensation in Washington political circles in June 2002, when a Democratic Senate aide found a CD-ROM lying on the ground in Lafayette Park, just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. The aide had no idea what was on the unmarked disk, but soon found that it was the full text of two PowerPoint presentations. One was a slide show to accompany a speech by Rove, and the other was meant to accompany a presentation by Rove's top aide, Ken Mehlman, who at the time was White House political director and who would later become the manager of the president's reelection campaign. The subject of both presentations was the then-upcoming 2002 House and Senate midterm elections. There were a few embarrassing news stories about the lost disk — the presentations contained some less-than-optimistic assessments of Republican chances in a couple of Senate contests at a time when the GOP was publicly saying chances looked good. But the story soon faded.
The PowerPoint presentation that Steitz and other Democrats had was a completely different document — much more detailed and sophisticated. It was apparently acquired by Democrats sometime in the late spring of 2003. I asked Steitz if he would show it to me, and he agreed. What I saw was a remarkable work. It's no wonder it had a profound effect on the Soros group.
The presentation, titled the "72 Hour Task Force," contained the results of a "top to bottom review," ordered by Rove, of GOP turnout efforts in the 2000 race.What was perhaps most remarkable about it was that it was a harrowingly self-critical assessment of the Bush campaign's performance. The essential question it asked was,Why did we come so close to losing? To find an answer, Rove began by taking a sober look at the difference between preelection state polls, which often showed Bush leading by significant margins, and the actual results of the election, in which Bush sometimes squeaked by. "In Arizona, the polling said we would win by ten, but we won by just six," the presentation said. "In Florida, the polling said we would win by two — we won by just a chad." That trend, Rove concluded, held true in nearly every other state Bush won.
As Rove looked ahead to 2004, he saw no particular reason for optimism. "Perhaps the president's leadership will lead to a realignment of the electorate, but we would be foolish to plan on it," the presentation said. Therefore, victory would probably go to whichever side was most successful in getting its voters to the polls. And the answer to that problem was deceptively simple: Rove's prescription was to "Get People Back into Campaigns." That did not mean simply asking GOP activists to try harder. Instead, the document said, it meant fundamentally rethinking the way the party motivated its voters and producing a blueprint for winning the next "turnout war." The "72 Hour Task Force" was that blueprint.
Rove was particularly impressed with Hillary Rodham Clinton's turnout plan in the 2000 New York Senate race. "Arguably the prototype for an exhaustive grassroots campaign," the Clinton plan was a six-month timeline, organized "down to the block level," with impressive big-labor support. The result simply blew away anything the GOP was doing at the time." Unfortunately, too many of our campaigns make the mistake of believing that we can simply pay to send mail and phone calls that will achieve the same result," Rove said. Instead, he advocated using the labor union principle — to "get people to take responsibility for as small a number of voters as possible" — in a Republican context, that is, without labor unions. Rove wrote that the campaign should rely on highly motivated volunteers and make each responsible for reaching a relatively small number of people. If a campaign made a volunteer responsible for shepherding the votes of too many people — say, 4,000 — then "you might as well give them 40,000." In other words, no one could keep up, or make personal contact, with so many voters. But if a worker was given responsibility for, say, 85 voters, then that worker could keep tabs on each one. Voters, Rove noted, are inundated with political ads and e-mails and phone calls, and "person-to-person contact cuts through the clutter." The presentation went on to describe extensive tests the Rove team conducted in off-year elections. Picking two similar state or local races, Rove's strategists poured money for old-fashioned politicking into one, and money for heavy voter contact into the other. The voter contact model won each time.
The copy of the PowerPoint that became "unintentionally available" to Democrats was rich in the details of Rove's testing models and conclusions. It contained not only the graphic slides to be presented to private GOP audiences, but also the script that the presenter used to describe the project. For Democrats, it was a gold mine of information. "It's really nice," Steitz told me. "The script is attached. I've been a student of it."
After the election, I asked Rove himself whether he knew at the time that Democrats had obtained a copy of the PowerPoint presentation. I asked the questions in the middle of a wide-ranging discussion of election strategy in which Rove was quite voluble, but when I got to the PowerPoint, his answers became very brief.
"Yes, I knew that at the time."
"Did you know how it got into Democratic hands?"
"No."
"Were you surprised that it did?"
"Yes."
"How did you react?"
"Problematic." That was Rove-speak for saying he viewed something as a potentially difficult situation.
But what was bad news for Rove and the Bush campaign was good news for George Soros. And on that summer day in Southampton, as he viewed Rove's secret PowerPoint, Soros was clearly fascinated with the nuts and bolts of political organizing. "He was sort of leaning forward and saying, 'So they go door-to-door to the same place?'" Steitz recalled. It was not long before Soros was sold.
But how would the voter contact idea be put into action? To address that part of things, the consultant team had invited two of the most important and successful organizers in Democratic politics: Ellen Malcolm, founder of the pro-choice political network EMILY's List, the largest political action committee in the country, and Steve Rosenthal, recently of the AFL-CIO, one of the best ground-level organizers in all of politics.Malcolm and Rosenthal were already planning to emphasize voter contact in the 2004 race, working through their new group, America Coming Together, or ACT, a 527 organization that would be allowed to accept unlimited contributions.
In a sense, Soros and his giving partner, Peter Lewis, were ahead of the activists. When I asked Malcolm what the group talked about after the consultants had made their presentation, she said that the talk quickly got deep into the details. "We had a lot of conversation about how it was all going to operate," she told me. "How did the coalition work? Who was going to make decisions? I remember Peter Lewis saying, 'If I'm mad about something that's happening in Ohio, who do I call on the phone and say, Who's responsible, it's all screwed up?' And we hadn't really started. I mean, we had the concept, we knew what we wanted to build in terms of the canvassing and the voter contact, but we had a lot of things to work out."
After the presentation, Soros said he wanted to think about it overnight. But he didn't take long to decide. "By the end of the weekend, it was clear that he was in," Steitz said. And in in a big way: Malcolm told me that she and Rosenthal walked away with commitments for a total of $23 million from Soros, Lewis, and a few others at the meeting. Within weeks, Soros began writing checks to ACT. First came $1 million on August 19. Then $2 million on September 12. Then another $2 million on December 23. And then $4.55 million to the Joint Victory Fund, an umbrella organization that then distributed the money to ACT, on April 15, 2004. In the beginning, Soros had pledged $10 million to ACT and other Democratic 527s. Then the number became $15 million. Then $20 million. Then $25 million. And then more. The 527s had never seen that amount of money come in from one person at one time. Soros would become the biggest donor in history.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of Soros's money for Democrats. And not just the money, but the message the money sent. "Go back to what the political culture was like at that time," Malcolm told me. "Democrats were pretty damned depressed. Bush was running roughshod, there was a lot of dissatisfaction, why weren't we fighting back more?...One of the important pieces of [Soros's] contribution, I think, was to signal to potential donors that he had looked at what was going on and that this was pretty exciting, and that he was going to stand behind it, and it was the real deal." And indeed, once Soros began giving, and word spread that he was giving, other contributions began streaming in. Soros, ACT, and the Democratic Party — with an enormous and wholly unintentional assist from Karl Rove — were in business.
I think we have a good handle on the extent of rat vote fraud, and, by extension, a look at their internal polls. Just like a hustler, they've been cheating just enough to win - stringing the public on election after election. In these cases their polls were wrong or they would have cranked out a few more boxes of ballots - just enough to win and keep the suckers coming back for the next game.
I wonder what the cost of failure is in the rat criminal enterprise. I would think that sooner or later they'd run out of get-out-of-jail-free cards or hit a roadblock in their system but these people never surface. Maybe they ascend to the rolls of permanent absentee voters.
You may be right about the purloined tape. I didn't do a fact finder check, just relied on memory that it was a company that did political advertising campaigns.
It would be interesting to hear what the moveon.org crowd would have to say about a Republican donor spending this kind of money to defeat dims...you can bet that they'd be doing their damnedest to put him behind bars.
I agree .. let them spend their ill gotten gains .. on losing.
There is another side of this story that needs to be investigated: namely the illegal coordination between ACT, the state Democrat parties, the DNC, and the Kerry Campaign.
Ping
good post.
I give Rove credit for his strategies regarding turnout.
But I still believe that the fundamental problem with the white house political team, that continues to this day, is their poor communications operation. they simply do not do a good job of getting a message out, of formulating a clear and concise message and repeating it over and over, and of getting surrogates to also use the same talking points. The Reagan team was great in this area, the current white house team stinks. We can't even get them to replace Scott McClellan, who is a terrible white house press spokesman.
so that's the fundamental thing you want out of this party - the ability for people to rack up debts and then walk away into bankruptcy and dump the costs on the rest of us who responsibly pay our bills and live within our means?
.....Hook. Line. Sinker....
That is "beware of park pigeons bearing CD's"
No, I want businesses that engage in stupid and foolish actions to take responsibility for their actions and deal with them and not go crying to Uncle Sam to bail them out! Responsiblity works both ways.. If a bank isn't going to be responsible about who they lend money to, then they have to deal with the fact that they lended to deadbeats and eat the losses.
5 Billion CC solicitations a year in a nation of 300 Million... banks have given credit anyone able to fog a mirror and then want to abdicate the fallout of their own failed business practices and use the force of government to bail them out... Its BS and its Crap and the Republican's in congress should be tarred and feathered for going along with it.
You can track the number of bankruptcy filings and number of credit card offers per year and you will find a DIRECT CORRELLATION! More offers, more bankruptcies... you'd think as a bank you'd realize... hmmm.. We are letting way to many folks that shouldn't get credit, we better tighten our lending requirements or we're going to go bankrupt... Oh no, Lets just make congress bail us out of our own stupidity.
The republicans in congress have sold out "responsibility" on this one.
an offer for a credit card is not some kind of license to steal - to use the money to buy stuff and then thumb your nose at the issuers when they look to be paid. I get plenty of CC offers just like everyone else does, mine go into the shredder.
Imagine the schmuck in the DNC who 'brought home' this little holy grail
Heh heh heh.
ping
Again you miss the point, not suprisingly. If you issue a credit card to someone with no money and a track record of not paying their bills... guess what, you are going to have to face the fact you loaned money to a deadbeat. You should do everything in your power to make sure that doesn't happen again.. that's called being responsible! However, banks don't do that do they? They keep on lending money out to folks who have no way in hell of repaying and whine to Uncle Sam to bail them out.
Sorry this bill is nothing more than welfare for bad business practices. You loan money to poor borrowers, you go out of business... well at least you used to, until the Republican's sold out responsibility for campaign donations!
This bill makes it tougher to file Chap 7 bankruptcy, which means Chap 13 bankruptcy attorney's are going to get more business thanks to this law... and EVEN THEY ARE AGAINST IT! It is that flipping bad of a law!!
The Republican's on this law basically lived up to every criticism they have gotten about selling out to corporate america. I'm a life long republican, but this law is a travesty, and smacks in the face of responsibility.
Counter factual is my favorite...
consumers were using the bankruptcy laws as licenses to steal - while it is true that the lenders are not screening as well as they could have, that does not discount the fact that alot of americans were simply scamming the system. maybe now they will just shred the CC applications, and in time when the issuers seem signups tailing off, they will stop sending them.
That's absolute lies and hogwash propogated by MBNA et al. Look at their own internal information about bankruptcies... you know what the number 1 cause of bankruptcy is? Do you ?? I do. Do you know number 2? Do you?? I do. Neither is people intentionally running up credit cards to buy stuff and refusing to pay credit card companies!
#1 is MEDICAL BILLS.
#2 is CREDIT CARD COLLECTION PRESSURE.. not refusal to pay, or even inability to pay, but credit card collection companies out and out harrassing debtors, violating the credit collection act of the 1970s (Yes, they do it all the time... CC Companies violate the law routinely and with impunity when it comes to their collection tactics) These people are unwilling or even unable to pay, but because of the collections actions of the CC departments, many in violation of FEDERAL LAW, drive folks to bankruptcy.
Willful intent to NOT pay ones debt, doesn't even make the top 10 of why folks declare bankruptcy! That's a complete falacy! Criminals don't get credit cards run them up and refuse to pay them off and run with the high price booty they bougth to jamaca... Criminals steal someone elses identity and spend money on those stolen Credit Cards, not their own!... The argument you are putting forth is absolute and unequivicable LIE.
Credit card companies themselves KNOW THIS! Its their own studies that have shown it!
Credit card companies don't obey the laws that they are supposed to, yet can buy Congress to get a law changed to cover up their own ineptitudes. This law is a travesty, and the Republicans need to be tarred and feathered for selling out to them for campaign contributions! Everyone bitches about Soro's 25 Million.. well guess what, thats exactly what the Republican Congress accepted, to sell out the american public to the Credit Card companies!
well then there is nothing to worry about. if as you say there are no consumers who are willfully intending to defraud credit card companies, then they should be unaffected by having stricter bankruptcy regulations. I know I could care less about this law.
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