IF YOU'RE A KEPT MAN ALREADY, DOES THE KEEPER REALLY MATTER?:

Inside The Dems' Shadow Party: How they're using soft money and private groups to combat the GOP money machine (Business Week, 3/22/04)

In 2002, as campaign-finance reform was about to become law, a few savvy Democratic activists saw the future -- and it was potentially devastating. The problem: While the Democratic Party raised $520 million in the 2000 election cycle, nearly half of it came in big-buck "soft-money" donations that the McCain-Feingold Act would all but eliminate. In the upcoming Presidential election, the Dems would be even more badly outgunned by the GOP, which in 2000 pulled in $712 million -- but only $246 million of it in soft money. To make an end run around the new campaign law, these behind-the-scenes players rushed to set up political committees that can legally collect soft money, pay for issue ads, and encourage voter turnout.

The downside: They cannot give to candidates or be directly connected to a political party. Known as 527s after a provision of the federal code that grants them tax-exempt status, the committees have been spectacularly successful since they got under way last year, having already raised almost $100 million in soft money. More important than the dollars, though, is the highly sophisticated political machine under construction -- a web of interlocking, like-minded organizations that could at once save and partly supplant the Democratic Party. And if the 527s don't give presumptive nominee Senator John Kerry an edge against George W. Bush, they will at least help level the playing field.

This strategy is largely the brainchild of Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO. His group, America Coming Together (ACT), hopes to raise $95 million to build an elab- orate operation that will spur Democratic voters to the polls in 17 battleground states. ACT is working closely with the Media Fund, set up by former Clinton aide Harold Ickes, which hopes to raise an additional $50 million to target the same voters with issue ads.

These two big committees are coordinating with smaller 527s, as well as with more than two dozen left-leaning organizations such as the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood (table). The two groups even have jointly hired their own pollsters, opposition research, and public-relations team. "We're a lot like a campaign, but without a candidate," says Ickes.

Looking at this from John Kerry's perspective, how much difference does it really make, giving George Soros a lufa rub for his money or pummicing the dead skin off of Teresa Heinz's feet for hers?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 14, 2004 1:04 PM