Stealth Campaigns – Part Two
MoveOn.org and Freedom's Watch: The Iraq Ad-War
BY Sara Fritz | May 01, 2008
[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.
Censure and Move On webpage from 1998After 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.
Recently-departed Freedom’s Watch President Bradley A. Blakeman, a federal contractor, business lobbyist, and former top aide to President Bush, said his group — responding to the MoveOn.org attack on Petraeus — sprang into action even before it had an office or a staff. The group caused The New York Times to acknowledge that MoveOn.org had received a discount price for its full-page Petraeus/Betray Us advertisement. After that, in an interview with the Center for Public Integrity, Blakeman bragged that Freedom’s Watch had “taken down The New York Times and MoveOn.org” in one stroke. He said the leaders of MoveOn.org were caught “flatfooted” when his group came “over the hill like the cavalry with a real $15 million ad campaign [and] a coalition of real groups.” The group’s advertising will be done by Arthur Finkelstein, a reputed master of the political attack ad, but Blakeman insisted his group would never be as “mean spirited” as MoveOn.org.
MoveOn.org’s “General Petraeus or General Betray Us” Ad, 2007 (MoveOn.org Political Action)Freedom’s Watch declined to disclose how much money it intended to raise and spend in the 2008 cycle or to release the names of all the top donors. But Blakeman made it clear that he expected to have access to “millions of dollars.” He emphasized, “I will tell you in 2008 we expect to play a major role in issues and defining those issues that are important in the presidential campaign and that cycle.” He said one of Freedom Watch’s central concerns will be “radical Islam and the emerging Iranian threat” but declined to identify all the issues on which the group had decided to take a position. Freedom’s Watch has formed partnerships with many other like-minded organizations including Vets for Freedom, Rolling Thunder, and Families United. These alliances were much like MoveOn.org’s support of liberal groups led by military veterans such as VoteVets.org, and several labor unions, including Service Employees International Union.
The alliances have made Jon Soltz and Pete Hegseth very visible as frequent guests on cable television. They returned home after serving in the military in Iraq, but they have never stopped fighting. Now these two 20-somethings represent different sides of the argument over U.S. involvement in Iraq. Soltz heads VoteVets.org, an organization of military veterans that has described the war in Iraq as “a distraction” from the larger war on terror. Hegseth represented Vets for Freedom, a group of young veterans favoring the White House position and labeling itself “pro-mission.”
Iraq was the focus of many independent TV spots at the start of the 2008 election cycle. In almost every case, the ads featured real soldiers and military families. There would have been no way for viewers to know that the ads were paid for by rich donors who were unaffected by the hardships that soldiers and their families were experiencing.
Ads sponsored by Freedom’s Watch enlisted the parents of 2nd Lieutenant John Wroblewski, who was killed in Anbar Province of Iraq on April 7, 2004, to star in one of their first 30-second television spots. They noted their son’s last letter had said it was “very important to him to complete this mission.” Then Wroblewski’s father declared, “We implore the Congress to show the same courage that our son had.” Likewise, John Kriesel, a wounded vet who lost both legs in Fallujah on Dec. 2, 2006, stepped forward on his artificial legs in another Freedom’s Watch ad to proclaim: “It’s no time to quit. It’s no time for politics.”
In response, VoteVets.org aired an ad in which a veteran named Mike Breen told how he called for helicopters to bring his unit more ammunition during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2005. The helicopters never came. “Where were the helicopters?” he asked. The camera shifted to former General Wesley Clark, who says the helicopters Breen was waiting for were “stuck fighting George Bush’s war in Iraq.” In another VoteVets.org ad, Brian McGough, a wounded vet from Iraq, responded to a statement by conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh that veterans who criticize the war were “phony soldiers.” McGough declared that the trauma of his head injury was real, not phony. “Until you have the guts to call me a phony soldier to my face,” he said, “stop telling lies about my service.”