Killing the Messenger Read online

  Sometimes this independent apparatus caused pain for the party establishment, but it also provided a structure for developing new strategies in the kind of political trench warfare that Republicans became expert at over time.

  Democrats, on the other hand, had no such independent apparatus—primarily because they hadn’t needed one. While the influence of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party waxed (Walter Mondale) and waned (Joe Lieberman) with each presidential ticket, there was never an equivalent struggle for the soul of the party. Progressives for the most part continued to feel at home in the Democratic establishment, and, despite a few flameouts on the presidential level, that establishment had been successful, controlling Congress for four decades leading up to the Gingrich Revolution.

  Indeed, to the extent that a faction of Democrats established an influential organizational presence outside the party, it was the centrists who created the Democratic Leadership Council in the late 1980s. And even the DLC focused more on policy development and advocacy than on pure politics.

  In the 2000s, that began to change somewhat as new infrastructure sprouted up on the progressive side. Unlike its right-wing counterpart, this new infrastructure was not the result of ideological or party factionalism. To the contrary, these were broad-based groups operating within the mainstream of the Democratic Party and in support of widely-held progressive ideas and values. Groups like the Center for American Progress and Media Matters, funded in part by a growing network of donors under the auspices of the Democracy Alliance, were generally considered to be at the forefront of this new movement, with real successes to their credit in just a few years.

  But compared with groups on the right, CAP and Media Matters were still fledgling efforts when, in January 2010, in the 5–4 Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court ruled that independent groups funded by corporations, known as “SuperPACs,” could spend unlimited amounts of money in directly attempting to influence federal elections. And the Democrats’ lack of deep experience with outside groups caused them to fall behind once again.

  Suddenly, the financing of campaigns was the Wild West. The more money you could amass, the bigger the war chest, the more powerful you were.

  In the wake of the ruling, Republicans spent the better part of a billion dollars to win the 2010 cycle. Karl Rove, never afraid to seize on an opportunity to gain advantage, formed a SuperPAC called American Crossroads, raising $100 million and pouring it into slashing negative ads—and two wealthy industrialists from Kansas, Charles and David Koch, began to emerge as serious power players. (More about them later.)

  As expected, Republicans were able to unholster the biggest guns in the early days of the Wild West era of campaigns. What came as a surprise to me, although maybe it shouldn’t have, is that Democrats chose to disarm. They spent a long time lamenting the ruling—and with good reason. But their well-founded concern that these outside big money groups would turn our democracy into an auction made them reluctant to play by the new rules. Regardless of what you thought of Citizens United (I certainly thought it was both a terrible miscarriage of constitutional jurisprudence and a serious threat to the sanctity of our elections), it remains to me almost inconceivable that Democrats didn’t do something to try and compete on this new playing field.

  Newly able to accept unlimited cash, SuperPACs and other independent expenditure (IE) groups—which could directly advocate for the election or defeat of candidates but could not directly coordinate with those campaigns on strategy—were clearly about to emerge as the most powerful players in American politics, more powerful perhaps than the parties themselves, which operate with strict limits on donations. Rather than simply looking at the strength of a candidate’s campaign, analysts would now be looking at the IE support they would likely get as a key sign of success—and yet, Democrats essentially took a pass on working to establish their own IE efforts.

  It was, I believed at the time, a recipe for defeat.

  Sure enough, on Election Day 2010, Democrats were wiped out across the country. There were, of course, many reasons for the Red Wave: the campaign of misinformation on Obamacare, the emergence of the Tea Party as a political force, the Democrats’ recurring midterm turnout problem—but what turned a bad year into a total disaster was the fact that Republicans capitalized on the new rules, massively outspending the Democrats in the closing weeks of the campaign.

  As Election Day approached and outgunned Democratic candidates, supported by a late IE effort on their behalf, prepared their concession speeches, I began some discussions about what, exactly, we could and should do to even the advantage going forward.

  For me, the question of whether the new rules were good (of course they weren’t) had nothing to do with the question of whether Democrats should compete fully under those rules (of course they should). The law was the law. And unilateral disarmament, which seemed likely to become the official strategy of the Democratic establishment, would simply cement the Republicans’ advantage, leaving us hopelessly outmatched and putting everything we cared about at stake.

  So, I decided to do something about it.

  To be honest, I didn’t really have much of a plan. But I also didn’t have much reason to think that anyone else would step up and catalyze the critical conversation of how Democrats could stay competitive in a post–Citizens United world.

  Given the overall negative attitude of President Obama and most of his advisors toward third-party big-money groups, I had little reason to believe that they would take the lead. Their objections were partly principled—like most Democrats, they believed, and not unreasonably, that big money was corrupting democracy—but partly they were political. At this early juncture, most political people were, naturally, suspect of outside efforts that by law they could not control. And they believed that the new world of SuperPACs were superfluous to organizing progressive politics around President Obama’s strong personal brand.

  Though the term SuperPAC hadn’t yet been coined, I became familiar with third-party groups, then known as 527s, back in 2007. Excited about the prospect that Hillary Clinton might be the Democratic nominee—and eager to help—I got involved with a 527 called Progressive Media. Launched a few years earlier as a progressive effort to end the war in Iraq, the organization had morphed into a media fund planning to do opposition research and TV advertising against the Republicans to help the eventual Democratic nominee in 2008, whoever it would be.

  In late February, the major financial backer of Progressive Media, Hollywood producer Steve Bing, a longtime Clinton supporter, asked me to take over at the helm. I took a temporary leave from Media Matters and got to work reorganizing the group and writing a plan to help elect a Democratic president in 2008. It was no secret that I wanted Hillary to be that person. Some commentators and even some Democrats were already concluding that her chances had slipped away, but I wasn’t hearing it.

  A couple of months later, as they appeared to clinch the nomination, we learned that the Obama team wasn’t interested in our help. At a meeting of Obama’s national finance committee in Chicago, the committee’s chair, Penny Pritzker, made it clear that the campaign didn’t want its donors supporting Progressive Media—or any third-party group, for that matter. In May 2008, the campaign made a formal statement on the record disavowing such efforts, spelling the end of our attempt to raise money to help get Barack Obama elected.

  Shutting down the development of independent expenditure groups in 2008 was probably the right decision for candidate Obama. He went on to raise an unprecedented amount of cash directly into his campaign—disappointing campaign finance reformers by refusing to accept federal funds and thereby blowing up the limit on how much his campaign could spend—and he went on to win without outside help. (In the case of Progressive Media, it was understandable that the Obama campaign didn’t want to entrust our group, top-heavy with Clinton supporters, with its messaging.)

  But with the rise of new groups like Rove’s American Crossroads, the
political landscape shifted in 2010—delivering to the Democrats a historic “shellacking.” And yet President Obama seemed not to recognize what I saw as the clear reality of the situation. In fact, I knew that he had personally nixed the plans of some deep-pocketed Hollywood donors to come to the Democrats’ rescue in the midterm by forming a group to counter Rove’s. I wondered if the president just didn’t get what it would take to hold the Democratic majority in Congress that had helped him score so many victories during his first two years in office.

  But I also knew this: If we didn’t want to see a Republican romp to victory in 2012 and start repealing those achievements, one after another, we simply couldn’t afford to fight with one hand tied behind our back. Democrats were going to have to embrace SuperPACs. Anything else would be political malpractice. And regardless of how the powers-that-be felt about it, that just couldn’t happen.

  And so, whether anyone else was ready for it, I was going to start a SuperPAC. It was time for Democrats to get in the game.

  As it happened, I wasn’t the only person worried about the Democrats’ failure to compete during the cold, harsh winter of 2010–2011. Shortly after the election, at a Democracy Alliance gathering of the progressive movement’s biggest donors, we sought to harness their dissatisfaction by standing up and announcing the formation of a SuperPAC, American Bridge 21st Century. I chose the name, in part, to signify the metaphorical opposite of Rove’s American Crossroads, and also as a conscious echo of Bill Clinton’s “bridge to the 21st century.”

  We dedicated American Bridge to Obama’s reelection. But what would this new SuperPAC do? How much would it raise? What would be its playbook? We really didn’t know. We did know that something had to happen; the Democratic position of refusing to play by the new rules had contributed to a devastating loss in 2010, and we couldn’t afford to let it cost us the White House in 2012.

  The reaction to the announcement was mixed at best. The Democratic political class—especially donors—was frustrated with the midterm result, but they still weren’t ready to embrace SuperPACs. In fact, we started to worry that our intention to start a SuperPAC—which had only the vaguest of missions and was actively opposed by some of my own donors—might fizzle.

  But my team forged ahead, essentially willing American Bridge into existence. We soon decided on an approach for the new group that took advantage of what we knew best.

  The success of Media Matters owed in part to our aggressive, take-no-prisoners attitude toward right-wing vitriol: We weren’t afraid to stand up, and we never let an offender off the hook. But you can’t hold your opponents accountable for what they say if you aren’t keeping careful track of what they say.

  When it comes to Fox’s Sean Hannity, you can just hit Record on your DVR. But there’s no DVR for politicians; they often speak in settings where there is no media coverage and, of course, those are the settings where they tend to really let loose.

  That was why, in addition to opening a separate, massive opposition research shop for politics, we invested in an army of trackers. Trackers, as political junkies now know, are the mostly young staffers who follow around their opponents with video cameras and record every word they say. They’re not there to cause disruptions or provoke anyone; they’re simply there to document what happens so operatives back in the war room can analyze the footage and search for telling moments.

  And that was exactly what American Bridge set out to do. We would send trackers to campaign events to look for gaffes. We would deploy researchers to check court files and police records for information on politicians. We would scour voting records to build the case against Republican candidates and highlight their flip-flops. And we would put together dossiers to help Democratic ad makers launch their attacks.

  We would be a game changer for two reasons. First, simply by existing, we were ending the counterproductive internal debate among Democrats over whether to compete in the post–Citizens United world.

  In 2010, eschewing the “dirty” politics of SuperPACs while Republicans spent big, hand-wringing Democrats savored the moral victory of remaining above the fray—while Republicans celebrated actual victories that threatened to undermine the entire Obama presidency. With the birth of American Bridge, Democrats’ sense of moral superiority began to vanish—now we were entering the ring with the Republicans who had just kicked our butts.

  The move was a wake-up call to the party. Within a few months of our announcing American Bridge, Democrats took even more steps to get in the game. Top Democratic operatives established another new SuperPAC, Priorities USA, which would raise money to run ads for the president’s reelection, as well as two new SuperPACs to run ads in Senate and House races. (Though Priorities was established by two of his former aides, the president did not bless its activities for more than a year, and even then he held his nose, declining to appear on the group’s behalf.)

  As well as prodding the left to adapt to the new political reality, American Bridge would challenge long-held ideas about how to do political research. No, we wouldn’t be the first people to hire a bunch of trackers, send them to record politicians, and look to make hay out of the footage, although our tracking operation would dwarf anyone else’s. But we were proposing to consolidate essentially the entire progressive community’s research efforts under one roof—an idea that met with plenty of resistance.

  In addition to Priorities and the Senate and House SuperPACs, there was also big money on the left being spent by labor unions and an alphabet soup of advocacy groups. Each organization would, of course, have its own membership, its own issues and campaigns of interest, its own communications and political strategies, and so forth.

  But did each organization really need its own research operation? We didn’t think so. If four different organizations are interested in a Senate race, and pay four different research consultants to examine the Republican candidate’s voting record, professional background, and personal vulnerabilities, then they’ll end up with four largely identical reports (known as “books”)—and at least three of those organizations will have wasted their money.

  There was no good reason why Comedy Central, home to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, on which obscure clips would regularly become comedic fodder, should continue to have the best video archive in politics.

  American Bridge, we thought, could be a central clearinghouse for such information. We’d do the work, and in our shop the “books” wouldn’t sit on a shelf gathering dust—we would analyze and update and action the research in real time, as well as adding the tracking component. We would share any newsworthy nuggets with the press. And we would make it all available to our valued partners—the other big progressive groups and SuperPACs—to use in their communications efforts.

  You see, as Democrats prepared to enter the world of SuperPACs, if we tried to copy what Rove and the Koch brothers were doing, we would always come up short. The other side had a bottomless treasure chest that we would never match dollar for dollar. Instead, American Bridge would help the left do more with less. We would allow other organizations to eliminate duplicative research costs, leaving more money for their critical core functions, while, at the same time, incentivizing everyone to coordinate their work more closely, hopefully giving Democrats an on-the-field advantage.

  As I mentioned, we ran into some early skepticism, to put it mildly. Some groups wanted to control their own research the way they always had. Some didn’t really understand our rapid-response model. Others wondered how we would be able to ensure that everyone’s priorities were respected when it came to decisions like when to release a newly discovered piece of information or in what order we’d complete projects.

  In the end, we decided to simply get started and hope that, as we did with Media Matters, we would be able to prove the value of the concept early and earn the trust of our partners as we went. We would give them our research for free, avoiding potentially messy negotiations about how the model would work finan
cially.

  We even figured out a way to help Democratic campaigns make use of our work, even though the law prohibited us from directly coordinating with them. That is, I couldn’t e-mail a campaign manager to say, “Check out what your opponent is saying on birth control—and take a look at this article he wrote for his college newspaper that says the opposite.” There was no need to get sneaky about avoiding this roadblock: We decided to take the unusual step of making our “oppo” public. Once in the public domain, anyone, campaigns included, could stop by our website, see what we had published, and use it however they saw fit.

  The operation went more smoothly than anyone had anticipated. Despite concerns on the left that we wouldn’t be able to simultaneously service a range of competing organizations with different priorities, we rarely if ever had any problems coordinating among our important progressive allies, who worked together seamlessly. And despite some flak from old-school operatives who preferred to do things “their way,” it turned out that this new way was pretty effective.

  For example: As Washington gossiped about who Mitt Romney might select as his running mate, we worried about a repeat of the Sarah Palin fiasco from 2008—not the part where John McCain was humiliated as it was revealed how dangerously unqualified she was, but the part that came immediately after her announcement, when Democrats scrambled to figure out what to say about this obscure governor no one had ever heard of.

  Veteran political strategist Paul Begala, who was working with Priorities USA, had a great idea: Why not research some leading contenders, and put all the research up on a website in advance? We sent our researchers out to compile comprehensive reports on five Republicans we thought were the most likely finalists: Governors Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Senators Rob Portman of Ohio and Marco Rubio of Florida, and Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. We bought a website domain—VeepMistakes.com—and published all the research there, thousands of pages in all. The website got hundreds of thousands of hits in the first twenty-four hours.