Posted on 05/31/2002 11:59:57 AM PDT by Temple Owl
WILL McCAIN FEINGOLD BREED DEMOCRATIC FRATRICIDE?
Petty Cash
by Franklin Foer
Post date: 05.29.02
Issue date: 06.03.02
For employees of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), November 6, 2002, will be a scary day. Parties shed excess staff after virtually every election. But November 6 doesn't just mark the end of an election cycle; it marks the beginning of the McCain-Feingold era. And with the party deprived of the $250 million in soft money it raises every two years, this year's DNC cutbacks could reach "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap proportions. According to one top Democrat, the party's specialists in ethnic outreach and constituent relations will be canned, as will its experts in get-out-the-vote and field organization. In all, party chair Terry McAuliffe will likely sack as many as 100 of the party's roughly 400 employees. That's one reason the DNC has canceled long-standing plans to construct a palatial new headquarters (see "Building Block" by Michael Crowley, May 27). As one Democrat explains, "They don't need the space because they won't have the people."
It's not just that McCain-Feingold will force the DNC to downsize dramatically; it will force it to downsize a lot more than will the GOP--which boasts many more of the hard-money donors who will be able to continue giving once the new law takes effect. So Democrats have begun searching for ways to compete in the post-soft-money era. And the good news is that they have some plans. The bad news is that those plans may vastly increase the political power of trial lawyers, labor unions, and environmental groups--the liberal stalwarts who will replace the party itself once the DNC can no longer raise millions in soft money. In other words, campaign finance reform may unintentionally recreate the pre-Clinton days of bitter infighting between liberals and New Democrats--only this time without a strong party organization to referee.
here's no single Democratic plan for conquering the post-McCain-Feingold universe. "The party is a long way from that," says Ellen Malcolm, president of EMILY'S List, a group dedicated to electing pro-choice Democratic women and one of the liberal organizations on which the Democrats will increasingly rely. Because the DNC doesn't know how the Federal Election Commission will interpret some of McCain-Feingold's language, and because they can't predict the outcome of Mitch McConnell's legal challenges, the party can't focus solely on any one response. Nonetheless, the broad outlines of a strategy are beginning to fall into place.
There are two main tasks previously accomplished with soft money that McCain-Feingold will require the DNC to hand off, in large part, to new entities: get-out-the-vote efforts--involving everything from direct mail to yard signs--and "issue ad" campaigns in support of candidates. To deal with the former, the party is likely to revamp a group called the Association of State Democratic Chairs (ASDC). Currently, the ASDC is a little-utilized appendage of the DNC. "Four to six of the state parties are nothing more than post office boxes," one operative told me. "Its only claim to fame is that it's the place the Watergate burglars broke into." But the DNC hopes that with roughly $10 million in seed money from the AFL-CIO, this group can be transformed. Soon after November 6, party operatives speculate, it will hire refugees from the DNC and become something like a shadow party, opening its own state offices and running most of the party's get-out-the-vote operation. Labor could give the ASDC vast sums because the association would sever its affiliation with the party and reorganize itself under "527" tax status--a loophole in McCain-Feingold that allows political advocacy groups to accept and spend unlimited amounts, provided that they don't "coordinate" with campaigns and that the money goes into neither party nor candidate coffers. (Under an alternative scenario, the ASDC would maintain its current status and focus on corralling big donors into writing $10,000 checks to specific state Democratic committees--the legal contribution limit under the new law, and five times as much as can be given to individual candidates.)
But no matter how the ASDC is reorganized, it's unlikely to have the money to conduct the extensive issue ad campaigns on which both parties have lavished millions since the days of Dick Morris. It's here that Democrats hope liberal interest groups will pick up the slack. The problem, of course, is that a wave of chaotic, uncoordinated ads funded by a variety of liberal groups interested in different issues could do nearly as much harm as good. Enter Mike Lux, a veteran of People for the American Way and of Bill Clinton's Office of Public Liaison. Last year, long before it was clear McCain-Feingold would pass, Lux set up a group called the Progressive Donor Network to improve the electoral coordination and efficiency of liberal groups like the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). And McCain-Feingold's passage makes Lux's network much more powerful. "We're always going to do independent work," says NARAL's Kate Michelman. "But Mike Lux's group could help us think carefully about the issues that really are most mobilizing. We can save ourselves from duplicating efforts and coordinate where each of us is going to be." Lux hopes to establish a common fund to pool resources that will be used to cut ads collectively. Decisions on which ads to run, and where, would be made by a board of directors made up of representatives from contributing groups--perhaps the AFL-CIO, LCV, NARAL, and the Association of Trial Lawyers of America. And the effort is quickly acquiring cachet. In April, Lux convened a Washington meeting that drew presidential contenders John Edwards, Tom Daschle, and Dick Gephardt. Operatives from interest groups say that superstar consultants James Carville and Bob Shrum have signed up to advise the group. And according to one, McAuliffe has been putting big donors in touch with Lux.
ut there are serious problems with the ASDC-Lux solution. First, many big Democratic donors don't give out of ideology; they give because they want access. Indeed, ever since Clinton, the party has relied on an array of events--schmoozy dinners with politicians, coffees at the White House--designed to provide just that. But neither the ASDC nor Lux's group can offer donors access to pols without violating McCain-Feingold, which prohibits candidates from soliciting soft money that will be spent on their own campaigns. "We'd gotten really good at working within the old system," says one DNC official. "But without federal officeholders making the pitch, I've got no idea how we'll convince these people to give now."
Worse, the Lux solution will likely increase the clout of liberal interest groups vis-à-vis the party, which may incline those groups to increasingly advocate their ideological interests at the party's expense. Specifically, the groups funding the Progressive Donor Network may refuse to help the conservative Democratic candidates--often pro-gun and/or pro-life--who can win races in moderate-to-conservative swing districts. Indeed, if the present is any guide, they may even attack such candidates in the primaries in favor of more liberal (and less electable) alternatives. You can glimpse this divisive future in the current work of EMILY'S List. Two months ago the group spent about $400,000 on ads attacking ex-Clintonista Rahm Emanuel, who was running in the primary for an Illinois House seat, for supporting nafta. It's not entirely clear whether EMILY'S List funded the ads because Emanuel is pro-free-trade (trade isn't one of the group's primary issues) or because he is a man (though Emanuel is pro-choice, EMILY'S List preferred rival candidate Nancy Kaszak). But if the reason is the former (or even a little of both), EMILY'S List may have been pursuing a strategy that will grow more common in the years to come--liberal groups using a host of different issues to try to knock out more centrist Democrats in primaries. And if it's those groups that have the big bucks to spend on issue ads--and not the party itself--there will be nothing to stop them.
dding to the potential for fratricide, a group called the New Democrat Network (NDN) has recently begun billing itself as the centrist counterbalance for the McCain-Feingold era. The group was started in 1996 by ex-Clinton campaign aide Simon Rosenberg, with an assist from Joe Lieberman and John Breaux, both of whom serve on its executive committee. Like the Progressive Donor Network, NDN is scrambling to fill the void left by the party's decline. It has hired Tom Ochs, a political consultant who used to partner with the legendary Bob Squires, along with recruiting Vic Fazio (the former chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) and Joe Andrew (former co-chairman of the DNC), to help devise a plan for capturing the corporate soft-money donations that today flow to the DNC. The group, which doled out $5.8 million in the 2000 cycle--mostly from corporate interests such as banking and pharmaceuticals and from high-tech executives like Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Cisco's John Chambers--plans to raise $9 million this time around. And that's before McCain-Feingold even takes effect. "NDN will be the most important political organization in the country," says Andrew, capturing the grandiosity of the group's plans.
So the national Democratic Party--which, whatever its flaws, generally stays out of the internecine bloodletting of contested primaries--could give way to two competing, well-funded ideological blocs. Every two years these blocs would spend millions battling one another for control of the party. "Friendly competition could easily become unfriendly competition," says one party veteran. "And here's the important fact: Every dollar spent in the primaries is a dollar that isn't spent trying to beat Republicans." And considering that the GOP will probably have many more dollars to begin with, that could be bad news indeed.
Franklin Foer is an associate editor at TNR.
I thought EMILY'S list was supposed to be dedicated to electing pro-choice (preferably female but not necessarily) candidates. Are they now openly admitting they are Democrat only or am I just mistaken?
Oh Joy! I don't know much about EMILY, but she certainly comes across as a disheartened Democrat. LOL
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