A right-of-center blogger and strategist I know made an interesting point on Twitter, with regard to tomorrow's teabagging parties:
OFA and MoveOn isn't astroturf... but FreedomWorks is. Come on. If this were them, it would be far more centralized & organized #teaparty
This seems like a suitable time to remind folks of how Dick Armey's "grassroots group" obtained it's membership: through illegal fraud. From the Washington Post:
In 2001, Jennifer B. Chace heard an insurance broker's pitch for a new insurance company marketing tax-free medical savings accounts. She jumped at the offer, but first, the broker told her, she would have to sign an application -- already filled out -- that would entitle her to a low group rate.
With that signature, Chace, a Florida dentist in the market for health insurance, unwittingly joined one of Washington's most prominent conservative organizations, Citizens for a Sound Economy, she would later testify.
"Before I showed you this form today, did you even realize that you signed a form that was an application for membership in Citizens for a Sound Economy?" her lawyer would ask during a 2004 deposition.
"I don't know what Citizens for a Sound Economy is," she replied.
Chace's experience has brought to light an obscure arrangement between a prominent Republican businessman, J. Patrick Rooney, and a free-market interest group that has netted the grass-roots organization hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of new members. Citizens for a Sound Economy -- now called FreedomWorks and headed by former House majority leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) -- has netted more than $638,000 and about 16,000 members through the sale of insurance policies.
And unlike OFA and MoveOn, FreedomWorks is not funded by the grassroots. It's funded by giant corporations who pay it to create the illusion of grassroots support around issues that real people would never actually rally around. From Common Cause:
Post-merger, the Astroturf lobbying continues. FreedomWorks has accepted corporate contributions from telephone giants Verizon and SBC (now AT&T).
...FreedomWorks is also on the record supporting the telecommunications industry's position on network neutrality. Broadband Internet companies like Verizon and AT&T would like to create "tiers" or "lanes" on the information superhighway: Their own content and services would be delivered using the fast lane; companies like Google and Amazon would be charged high fees to travel in the middle lane; and the rest of the web would be relegated to the slow lane.
Can you hear the masses now? "Give me a slow Internet!" "Stop taxing the rich!" "Stop Obama from giving 95% of working families a tax cut!" "Cut capital gains taxes for AIG execs, and trick me into joining your email list while you're at it!"
After reading your rant about what you describe as Common Cause's "remarkable legacy of failure," my first reaction is to suggest that you might want to talk to your doctor about upping your meds.
Most of your post seems to reflect a basic disagreement over whether Common Cause should be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, or of the progressive movement, or of the lefty blogosphere. We were founded by John Gardner, a Republican who served in the Johnson administration, and we have always been proud of our bipartisanship and independence. We do not believe that either major political party is free from corruption or has a monopoly on good government as a political issue. We believe Americans want a change away from partisan gridlock.
We are proud to have Jim Leach as our new board chairman. This is a man who, while in Congress, stayed away from partisan confrontations and concentrated on working in a bipartisan manner on the process issues that define Common Cause. He is an environmentalist who lost his 2006 race in part because he refused to allow anti-gay literature the National Republican Congressional Committee wanted to distribute.
At a minimum, you cannot possibly expect to be taken seriously when you accuse us of helping John McCain "evade responsibility for the Keating 5 scandal" when Common Cause filed the original ethics compliant against the Keating 5. Common Cause has limited resources, and the fact that we have not unleashed a legal and public relations attack on every politician you happen to find offensive (Joe Lieberman, Al Wynn, John McCain, etc.) does not make us prisoners of a blind faith in non-partisanship. In fact, we often -- but not always -- find ourselves as coalition partners with some of the very groups who meet with your approval, such as MoveOn. We spent a great deal of time, energy, and money working to draw public attention to the DeLay scandal, among others, and if you are going to call us "losers" it would be nice if you showed some familiarity with the range of projects we have taken on in recent years.
As for our organization "remaining silent" during the "latest ridiculous episode," apparently referring to McCain and public financing, I would direct you to work we did in Iowa and New Hampshire, working with dozens of activists to get the candidates to sign a pledge committing to support full public financing for congressional campaigns-not only did we get several major candidates on the record, but we ran full page ads in the largest papers in Iowa and all of the daily newspapers in New Hampshire listing who had signed on and who had not. McCain and his photo were clearly in the "not signed on camp." (And we should note that, after the Iowa ad ran, both Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson promptly returned a signed pledge.)
Last week Common Cause, Public Campaign and Public Citizen released a document detailing the shortfall of all three major presidential candidates when it comes to money in politics and noting the lack of support McCain has shown thus far for either congressional or presidential public financing reform. We were the leaders to pass full, statewide "Clean Elections" in Connecticut and are currently working in 18 states to pass state-level public financing reforms.
I don't have the time to type out all of the work Common Cause has done in nearly 40 years of its proud history to hold people in power accountable, so I refer you here: http://www.commoncause.org/sit...
In my last post on Common Cause, I didn't bring up the newer better groups that have emerged to make corruption and good government voting issues. CREW and Public Campaign, while both are explicitly nonpartisan and do not do work on behalf of candidates, are extremely aggressive about putting the question of good government and corruption to voters. Public Campaign, for instance, has worked on McCain's flouting of FEC law, and the group did push for the FEC to step in on petty cash. CREW is unafraid to go after Republicans, and though corruption is nonpartisan, takes the fight to where it tends to be.
Ultimately these groups are pushing for nonpartisan solutions, public financing of elections and stronger ethics enforcement in Congress, but they are asking the voters to make that choice. And that's the right way to deal with corruption in a democracy.
Public Citizen, the government watchdog group, is offering itself as a character witness for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in his defense against recent reports questioning his close ties to lobbyists.
"Regardless of how many lobbyists are working on his campaign or raising money for him, John McCain has fought for 14 long, hard years for reforms that seriously limit lobbyists' power," Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, said in a statement....
Claybrook said McCain has a record of standing up to powerful interests in Washington. "He has fought for campaign finance reform, limits on gifts and travel from lobbyists, and extensive public disclosure of lobbyists' activities - all of which limit the influence of lobbyists and the companies that hire lobbyists in Washington, D.C.," she said.
People at Public Citizen hate the branding associated with their founder, Ralph Nader. But I suppose it's just in their DNA.
If anyone from Common Cause would like to respond to this, we do allow a 'Right to Respond' on the front page.
I'm going to follow on Mark Schmitt and Atrios in their reasonable criticisms of Common Cause. I got this disgusting invitation from the group a few weeks ago.
Yes, that's former Congressman Jim Leach, Republican, who voted for Republican Majority Leader Tom Delay repeatedly (and chaired Whitewater hearings and voted for Clinton's impeachment) before being voted out of office in 2006. He's now the Chair of Common Cause, the group that sought to regulate blogs a few years ago under FEC law, potentially as political committees. That's who Common Cause chose as their chair. That's simply disgusting and dishonorable and they should be ashamed of themselves.
If you want to point to one single rationale for Common Cause's existence, it's the removal of the improper influence of money from the political system. So that group's failure to do anything about McCain's open lawbreaking around public financing is a symbolic measure of just how badly this group has failed. Not only has Common Cause, run by a group of DC insiders who think of themselves as liberals but operate in fact as status quo concern trolls, not removed the improper influence of money from politics, but the group has actually been a critical moderate washcloth for John McCain, helping him evade responsibility for the Keating 5 scandal, and now helping him eviscerate campaign finance law law by remaining silent during this latest ridiculous episode.
Common Cause needs to go away or completely overhaul its board and strategy. Perhaps an overhaul makes sense, as there is some residual value in the brand and there are some good people working there. Still, when your goal as an organization is to deal with corruption and you choose as your chair a Republican who voted for Tom Delay in the name of some sort of fabled bipartisanship, your group is a failure.
On a larger movement level, Common Cause has a basic theory about politics that has been explicitly proved wrong at every turn. They believe that placing restrictions on the flow of money into politics is a strategy to end corruption, and yet since their foundation in the early 1970s, the number of lobbyists has radically increased and the influence of money has grown by leaps and bounds regardless and sometimes because of the restrictions the group put in place. As a corollary, the group does not believe in politics. When I dealt with Donna Edwards and Al Wynn in 2006 and a stolen primary election, Common Cause and its vaunted electoral protection program was nowhere to be found. They are losers, they act like losers, and they deserve scorn until they stop acting that way.
It's other groups, like Public Knowledge, Actblue, Color of Change, Moveon, and Free Press, who have taken up the mantle of Common Cause and embarked on a different route to removing the improper influence of money from politics. And that is to empower the public with open systems and tools for making changes at the ballot box. As long as the public tolerates corruption, it will continue. And like it or not, and Common Cause clearly doesn't, the Republican Party is built on the premise that corruption and bad faith are worth voting for, and the Democratic Party is built on the opposite premise. And so the public has a clear choice at the ballot box, and good for that. We can win that fight by persuading people to vote for their values and by organizing.
And so I wish Republican Jim Leach, Common Cause, and the rest of the antipartisan concern troll community well in their quest to restrict the behavior of involved citizens in the political process and to whitewash the lawbreaking of the current Republican Party leader. I'm sure that's a route to success.
UPDATE: I'll note this is systemic. When Republican Congressional candidates break FEC law - for instance when Lieberman spent $150K in petty cash in the last few days before the election - Common Cause was nowhere to be found. Losers.
