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Stealth Campaigns – Part Two

MoveOn.org and Freedom's Watch: The Iraq Ad-War

[Editor’s note: MoveOn.org’s political action committee announced yesterday that it will spend a million dollars on a month-long ad campaign against Republican John McCain. The group has endorsed Democrat Barack Obama.]

As the 2008 presidential campaign cycle got going, the undisputed leader in the field of independent attack advertising was MoveOn.org, the liberal Democratic group with loads of money, a popular website, and more than 3 million registered members. As MoveOn.org grew in stature and influence, Republicans grew intensely anxious about the power of liberals to raise money, mobilize voters, and influence public opinion – and answered by launching Freedom’s Watch to fight back.

Even before the Democratic nominee has been chosen, the battle of rival independent groups has been joined.  Both groups, fed by millions from major partisan donors as well as throngs of small donors, have built complex legal structures with the aims of maximizing the secrecy of their operations and staying beyond the Federal Election Commission’s grasp.  And both promise to lead the way as they and similar independent groups bulldoze the political landscape into new shapes on the way to the November election.

MoveOn.org was founded as a website by a couple of Berkeley, California, Democrats, Wes Boyd and his wife, Joan Blades, during the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton in 1998. The name was based on the idea that they wanted Congress to “move on” to something more important than investigating Clinton’s dalliance with a White House intern. The popularity of their website brought them enough money to buy anti-impeachment ads in The New York Times and, eventually, to become a permanent fixture in American politics.

After 9/11 Boyd and Blades found an ally in Eli Pariser, whose own website, 9-11peace.org, seemed to appeal to the same 20s and 30s demographic category as MoveOn.org. After signing on as director of MoveOn.org’s operation in New York City, Pariser helped to establish the organization as the voice of young, anti-war liberals. Quite by accident at first, MoveOn.org gave the Democrats better access to the party’s liberal base voters, much as the Christian Coalition had done for Republicans in the 1980s. Although MoveOn.org’s message was far more stridently liberal and anti-Bush than the official pronouncements of the Democratic Party, the organization quickly earned a place at the table at Democratic strategy meetings in Washington, D.C.

Founded on millions of small donations, MoveOn.org hit the jackpot when it was embraced in 2004 by George Soros and his circle of rich friends, who later organized themselves into a loosely structured coalition known as the Democracy Alliance. Like MoveOn.org, Soros and his friends favor a more liberal brand of politics than was being advocated by a majority of the candidates who sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. Of course, MoveOn.org does not officially speak for the Democratic Party; realistically, however, Democratic candidates benefit (or suffer) from the organization’s freedom to lob attacks directly at Republicans.

It was that independence that enabled MoveOn.org to grab headlines in September 2007, by anticipating a long-awaited report on the progress of the Iraq war by General David Petraeus. The group created an ad suggesting his name should be changed to “General Betray Us” because he was advocating a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq. The ad, which appeared in The New York Times, called on the general to come up with a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq. The Republicans’ response to that ad demonstrated just how influential MoveOn.org had become and how intent the GOP was to discredit its supporters. Democrats seemed afraid to defend the group. When the GOP members of Congress put forward a resolution condemning MoveOn.org for its attack on Petraeus, it passed both the House and Senate with strong bipartisan support.

Shortly after the Petraeus dust-up, Republicans announced the creation of Freedom’s Watch, well-funded and plainly intended to be the conservative answer to MoveOn.org. Freedom’s Watch, backed initially by a group of millionaire donors and former Bush White House appointees, started out with at least $15 million in ads calling for victory in Iraq.