January 12, 2006
Democracy Alliance 2.0
The Democracy Alliance, an informal network for rich liberals, has neither a functioning website or a clear role to play in the development of progressive ideas and campaigns over the next several cycles.
Tonight, DA donors will gather at the Georgetown manse of Dem uber-fundraiser Herb Miller to welcome their new executive director, Judy Wade, a McKinsey and Co. partner from San Francisco who has scant political experience.
Can Wade make the Alliance relevant?
As we've written, The group aimed to plant the type deep root structure that Dems believe the conservative movement developed in the 1970s and 80s. Rich foundations at the bottom, donating to candidate/activist training schools and up to start-up media and echo chambers and to think tanks, and then into campaigns and the bureaucracy.
The result: tight discipline, common goals, shared tactics, aggresive reaction (and pre-action) to historical and political developments, and, in general, much more cohesion. Conservative ascendence.
The DA's prime mover was Rob Stein, a lawyer and ex-DNC chief of staff who spent years trying to unravel the strands of the conservative movement. Stein entered his conclusions into a Power Point presentation which demonstrated so acutely the organizational deficiencies of Democrats that many of the party's top fundraisers and operatives were stunned into giving Stein's ideas a hard look.
Stein brought the presentation to meeting rooms across the country and quickly convinced dozens of big-name Democratic donors that the way to revive American liberalism would be to copy the institutional structure that conservatives built.
Hence the DA, which quickly secured $80 million or so in seed money to be spread over five years.
But many DA donors grew frustrated with the pace of the project and last year, Stein agreed to relinquish day-to-day control; Democrats familiar with the Alliance say Stein was a poor manager, better at evangelizing than motivating employeers.
To replace him as CEO, the DA hired Wade.
At the last DA meeting, held in Atlanta in October, the group moved forward on its plans to raise $250K each from 1,000 individuals over five years and wrote checks to groups like the Center for American Progress and to David Brock's Media Matters. ($6M went to America Votes.)
But CAP and Media Matters (and Air America Radio) get money from other, non-DA sources too. And labor unions remain the financial engine of the Democratic Party. And the parties themselves are raising more hard money than they use to. And in 2008, prospective presidential candidates will blow through state spending limits and could raise nearly a $1 billion between them.
So just how big a role it plays in the new liberal/progressive coalition is up for debate. [MARC AMBINDER]
Posted at 12:56 PM
Comments
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everyman | 01.12.06 01:48 PM
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I wrote www.DontThinkOfaDonkey.com last summer. I link to the Democracy Alliance website and every month or so I go back hoping to learn something about what they are up to. I have been involved in developing campaigns with websites for under $100, what's the deal? And the entire endeavor, as a write at donkey, is so full of problems, the roots of which lay with not understanding the right or the left. It will be interesting to see yet another multimillion dollar failure, but sad, so sad.
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